


my words are growin' stronger, and my legs keep gettin' longer

by weekend_conspiracy_theorist



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Amateur Ghost Hunting (on YouTube), F/F, Found Family, Gen, Trans Warlock Dowling, the Dowling's A+ Parenting, the magic inherent in strong friendships between teenage girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-01 21:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20900195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weekend_conspiracy_theorist/pseuds/weekend_conspiracy_theorist
Summary: Warlock Dowling is disillusioned with the magic of her childhood, uncomfortable in social situations, and skeptical of the existence of ghosts. Within three months, all of that will change.Or: what's it like, to be the Chosen One but not to BE the Chosen One? (Especially when one is also eighteen, trans, a lesbian, and a witch.)





	1. Gertrude "Pinto" Bernard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_warm_beige_color](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_warm_beige_color/gifts).

> According to the first screenshot posted in #wip on my gomens sideblog, I started this fic in early July. It's now early October, which means it only took me about three months to write thirty-four thousand words of trans lesbian witch coming of age fic about the power of friendship. Incredible.
> 
> Please, enjoy.

The professor hesitated, vaguely rumpled sheet of paper in hand, and frowned down at it. “That can’t be right,” he said, just loud enough to be heard.

“No, it is,” she told him, from the middle-to-back of the room, where her twin urges to be studious and yet also to rebel had deposited her. She didn’t need him to say it; she knew it was her name tripping him up. “It’s on my birth certificate and everything: Warlock Dowling. Mum was on the good stuff and there were Satanic nuns about.”

Tittering laughter ran about the room, no doubt thinking she was making some blithely sarcastic sort of joke. She slouched a bit further in her seat, knees poking through the ripped holes of her jeans, and drummed her pen on the table.

The professor blinked at her, looking a bit tired of the semester already, and it was only day one. “Preferred nickname?” he asked, as he had every other student in the class.

“Warlock is fine.” Campy names were practically trans culture, after all, and she’d gotten lucky enough to be _born_ with one. As a bonus, it seemed to annoy her father that she held stubbornly to her given name instead of quietly yet effectively disowning herself. There wasn’t much to be said about hanging around, but as long as she played moderately nice and made a vague effort to be a loving daughter, at least her mother didn’t cut off her credit cards.

Money was always handy. Cheers for being loaded.

“Warlock it is,” the professor sighed. “Won’t be forgetting that one.”

_You’d be surprised_, Warlock thought, but she did not say it aloud. Jokes about childhood negligence were only funny on the internet; they tended to concern people when made in real life.

See, the thing is, most kids dream about being the Chosen One, right? To fall through the portal, fulfill the prophecy, bask in the warmth of a father or mother figure who’s just so proud of you, not just for saving the day but for being _you_. Kids dream of magic. But Warlock--

See, the thing is, Warlock hadn’t needed to dream, until rather abruptly all that magic had been gone from her life, without any sort of portal opening or cosmic war being fought or anything of the sort.

She was a bit disillusioned with the whole thing. Prophecies were fickle, or something. Who cared. Who needed to be the Chosen One when you could be yourself instead?

Nanny had told her once that she was the most important person in the world, and Brother Francis had elaborated on this to mean that everyone was the most important person in the world, in their own way, and that this was what made life worth living and people worth knowing. Warlock liked that concept a sight more than anything else she’d ever been exposed to, so it stuck around even though they didn’t.

Respect everyone, _especially_ yourself. It was all about confidence, which was always best backed up by competence.

“I’m not bothering to walk you through the syllabus,” the professor said dryly. “You can all _read_. And you’re never getting out of this class early again, so enjoy it. Scram.”

Scram they did--most of them, anyway. Warlock didn’t see a point in fighting her way out of the crowd till it had thinned a bit, and one girl came to an abrupt stop next to her, holding tight with one hand to a mostly-empty backpack slung over her shoulder. She was chewing gum.

“Your name’s seriously _Warlock_?” She asked, standing firm against the impatient throng of first years piling up behind her back, all eager to escape the narrow rows of desks before the professor changed his mind.

“Your name’s seriously _Gertrude_?” Warlock shot back.

She made it a point to be good with names, even when she’d rather save the effort for other, equally important things, like the proper maintenance schedule of the many terrariums arranged about her flat. But that stuff had to stay in her mobile instead.

Gertrude- nicknamed “Pinto” after her mother's car, as she’d insisted even before the professor could finish reading her last name- slowly grinned, fruity gum tucked behind her teeth, and stuck out a hand. “I didn’t know Satanists could be nuns.”

“Bet you didn’t know witches could be named Warlock, either.”

They shook.

“God, you’re cool,” Pinto told her, trailing behind Warlock (thereby finally releasing their frustrated peers) when she reluctantly rose from her seat and left. “I’m claiming best friend status for life.”

Warlock’s eyebrows shot up. "I didn't know Pintos were a race car."

“Zero to sixty in who cares, slower than me. It’s fine; you’ll love me. I make up for my own lack of disaffection by being stylish and witty and talking very fast.”

“I’m not disaffected. I’m self-assured with a hearty dose of pragmatism that borders on nihilism.”

“Even better.” Pinto did not even come up to Warlock’s shoulder, which would have made her very short if Warlock had not been on the tall side, and therefore left her just a bit shy of average. She _was_ stylish, in that athleisure sort of way that was extremely low effort, and she did also certainly talk fast. Her wit largely remained to be seen, but Warlock was willing to be convinced.

The sun was bright but not warm as they stepped out of the building into a late London summer, and it beat down sharply against their shoulders then glanced off into shadow. Warlock still gravitated towards plaids and dark colors (in a way that she stubbornly insisted to herself was based exclusively off of lesbian fashion trends), and the season was finally beginning to catch up with her aesthetic.

“Dorm?” Pinto asked, as they continued side by side.

“Apartment.”

“Rich?”

“And shamelessly fleecing my transphobic father and negligent mother for all they’re worth.”

“Brilliant,” Pinto said, in a way that said she had noted the sarcastic defense mechanism but was determined to remain cheerful. “Got a cauldron?”

“Just a couple of large spaghetti pots.”

“Perfect. I love to cook; supply enough groceries for us both and you’ll never go hungry.”

“Planning to do the dishes when you’re done?”

“It’s... negotiable.”

“Sounds like a no.”

“Knew you seemed smart.” Pinto blew a bubble with her gum, dark brown hair escaping her bun in curly wisps, and smirked up at her.

“We _are_ going to be friends,” Warlock said wonderingly. “Don’t know if I’ve ever properly had one before.”

It was hard, when you weren’t very interesting, and harder still when you were the first kid in town to say “Fuck it, teenage rebllion” and then, just when everyone else was starting to get moody themselves, you amended it with “Fuck it harder! Queer awakening!”

(And Warlock had never had delusions, or at the very least hadn’t had them for long. Chosen One with faerie godparents or not, she hadn’t been a particularly interesting child. She’d been fond of maths, for Christ’s sake--she might have been on a particularly benign collision course with mundane adequacy, had she not prodded her toes at the ruins of broken promises and decided that she didn’t need the assistance of anybody else at all to discover a bit of magic in the world.)

“Well,” Pinto said, after an awkward moment of visibly wondering if she shouldn’t be concerned, “that’s what uni’s for, I suppose. What are you studying?”

“Philosophy.” Warlock jutted her chin out slightly, as if daring the sort of comment that her father had first offered when he’d heard about her decision. He hadn’t been thrilled of her coming back to England, either, even with her dual citizenship.

But her new friend just snorted, hiking her backpack properly onto both of her shoulders. “I’m hardly surprised.”

The defiant wind left her sails. Slightly awkwardly, Warlock asked, “You?”

Pinto’s answering smile was serene. “I considered some sort of political science thing, really try and browbeat the world into being a better place with my iron fist, but the balancing act of despotism while remaining beloved of the people sounded emotionally taxing, so I’m going in for journalism instead.” She shoved one light brown fist into the air. “Voice of the people, here I come.”

“Always easier to rebel than to rule,” Warlock observed.

“Amen to that. What’s it like being a witch?”

“Just like being anyone else, except I feel responsible for things I shouldn’t.” Warlock’s eyes flicked down, noting the way Pinto’s eyebrows lifted and then lowered, her dark eyes narrowing. She came to a stop on the pavement, and Pinto followed suit, the crowd of university students parting around them with jostled annoyance.

“Not a joke,” Pinto said, in a voice that wasn’t quite _disbelieving_ but was certainly more than a touch skeptical. “Not an internet witch herbalism tarot cards thing? You’re talking about _real magic_?”

Warlock hesitated, and Pinto huffed a sigh, tossing her chin exasperatedly to the side and then back, with the air of someone who’d kind of wanted to be let in on the secrets of the universe but wasn’t all that surprised to be let down. “You don’t even have a _cauldron_,” she said, in a way that sounded very much like it meant she should have known better than to even ask. “It’s fine; I don’t mind you being a bit of a nutter.”

“I’m not crazy,” Warlock huffed, “and I am a witch. It’s just-- It’s more subtle than you’re thinking, yeah?”

Sometimes she did think she was a bit off her rocker. Most of what a witch did wasn’t really _magic_, unless people believed that it was, and obviously almost nobody really bought into that sort of thing any more.

“Hmm,” Pinto said, with polite skepticism. “Well, thoughts on astrology?”

“I’ve been reliably informed that the Earth is a libra.”

Pinto’s eyebrows rose and fell again. “Fascinating. Lunch?”

Warlock shoved her hands in the stupid small pockets of her jeans, bemoaning the fashion industry’s vendetta against women’s pants and feeling all hot and awkward along the back of her neck. She wasn’t good at this, as you may have noticed what with all the oversharing and the sarcasm.

“I’ve got another class,” she said, because it was true, and she was probably already going to be late. It was easy to blame that on the first day of classes, of course. She pulled her mobile from her pocket, pulling up the contacts list. “Er, if you were serious about the whole best friend thing--”

Pinto plucked the phone away immediately, and saved herself under a little red car emoji. She even snapped a purposefully atrocious selfie, straight up her nostrils, for the contact picture. “Just try and get rid of me, madam. I’ve got this one cool roommate, and I wasn’t kidding about the cooking thing either, so…”

“Text me a grocery list,” Warlock told her, shoulders slumping with relief. “I just sent you my address.”

Pinto’s grin was borderline manic, and sparkled in the sunlight. “Absolute mad lad. Absolute nutter.” She glanced at her phone, mouth twisting with a shocked, delighted sort of disgust. “This is in _Mayfair_!”

“Absolute witch,” Warlock corrected patiently, “And I told you, I’m bloody well _loaded_. See you tonight.”

* * *

That stupid _fucking_ car was parked in her spot again. The spot wasn’t even _designed_ for cars; the pretentious vintage piece of shit was parked half on the curb, for Christ’s _fucking_\--

Warlock breathed in deep, breathed out longer, flipped off the building because some sixth sense told her the owner of the car happened to be glancing out their window at that very moment, and then parked her Vespa down the street. The next time she had a chance to steal _her_ spot back, she was taking a taxi to her classes for a week straight, just see if she didn’t.

[16:02 message to: ] _just come over whenever u & the roommate are free, we can hang out at mine_

She didn’t bother checking her mailbox--she was juggling too many bags, slave to the many whimsical ingredient requests Pinto had sent sporadically throughout the day. Besides, she’d lost the key almost as soon as it had been handed to her when she’d moved back to London a couple of months ago. Enough of the building were lazy, entitled bastards that the mailman occasionally got fed up with the overflowing little boxes and had the maintenance guys shove stuff under everyone’s doors, so she hadn't coughed up the cash to get a replacement yet.

It’s not like she got anything but spam mail and bills, anyway, and she had automatic payments set up for the latter. Ludicrous, how much spam seemed attracted to this building, though.

“Afternoon,” she mumbled, passing one of her neighbors on the stairs, but the little old lady barely spared her a glance. And people said Americans were rude--at least everybody who lived in her mother’s apartment building was willing to do that white-people-grimace-smile thing.

“Hey, kiddos.” Warlock flipped on the light, even though the many sun lamps around the room were enough, in conjunction with the thin curtains, to decently illuminate the space. “Did you miss me?”

There was a smattering of ribitting from the far left corner, but it probably didn’t have all that much to do with her actual presence in the room. That was fine. It was kind of what she liked about keeping amphibians, arthropods, and insects; they needed her to tend for them, but they didn’t really care who she was as a person. They got on with their lives regardless.

She got everything shuffled off into the fridge and the pantry, and then suddenly she knew, with one brief flash of insight, that there was about to be a knock at the door. Warlock was in place to answer it before knock number two could fall.

“Witchy woman,” Pinto greeted, projecting an exuberant aura (in the metaphorical sense) that swept behind her as she pushed past Warlock into the apartment. “God, this is bougie. Is that a tarantula?”

“Don’t tap on the glass.” Warlock offered a tight smile to Pinto’s roommate. “I’m Warlock,” she said, in lieu of anything better, and stepped aside to let the girl in.

The roommate smiled back, similarly awkward, and shoved her hands in the pockets of her green skinny jeans. “Pinto says I don’t get a name till we come up with something dumb enough that I won’t stick out between you two. I usually go by Karen, though.”

“Does Pinto generally run your life for you?”

“Well, I’ve only known her for about forty-eight hours.”

“That’s not a no. We had a five minute conversation and then I bought her a week of groceries.”

“It’s a talent,” Pinto called, already disappeared into Warlock’s bedroom. “I’m disappointed by the lack of spiderwebs, excluding the various, y’know, terrariums. Where’s the panache, Warlock? The ambiance? The pentagrams? The big black floppy hat?”

“I only pull it out for special occasions.”

Karen looked faintly amused. “Really?”

“No.” Warlock shut the front door, locking it with a dramatic flick of her wrist and tipping her chin up into that haughty angle that went best with a little ruthless sarcasm. “I keep it under my pillow and sleep in it every night.”

She got a laugh in response, and felt inordinately pleased with herself as she gestured Karen towards the couch. It was a massive L-shape, designed for comfort first and style second, though it managed to deliver on both, more or less.

"This really is a very posh place," Karen said, hesitating by the couch for a moment and then bypassing it in favor of investigating the salamanders in their enclosure on the table next to it. "Is this a witch thing or a Warlock thing?" She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and pulled a face. "You know what I mean," she muttered.

Warlock huffed a quiet agreement, flopping into the corner of the L and kicking her feet- combat boots and all- up onto the couch. "I'm not _raising them for_ _potions ingredients_ or whatever, if that's what you're asking."

Karen's lips twitched. "I suppose it was."

"I just like them."

"They're a bit slimy." Karen did not say it with judgement; merely hesitancy.

"That's the appeal," Pinto declared, reappearing from the back rooms with a substantive encyclopedia of bugs hefted in both hands. "Can I borrow this? My brother'd fucking flip for the beetle bits, I wanna make some scans."

Warlock chewed her lip. She didn't mind the nosiness, and was even a bit grateful for the overfamiliarity, but she'd had that book since her ninth birthday and had annotated it quite heavily in parts. "Get it back to me before Friday?"

"Tomorrow. We're best friends now, we see each other every day; it's part of the deal." Pinto dropped the book onto the coffee table from just high enough to make a satisfying _thud_ without risking damaging the book. "Your downstairs neighbors are going to hate it."

"I deserve the opportunity to let off a bit of steam, considering how big of a wanker _my_ upstairs neighbor is." She pointed up, lip curling in disgust. "He'll be quiet for weeks and then bam, Queen. All hours of the night."

Her new friends exchanged a look. Pinto pointed out, "Could be worse; could be constant."

"Could be Nickleback," Karen added.

Warlock couldn’t bite back the bark of laughter. "Small blessings,” she agreed, and raised her eyebrows as Pinto dropped heavily down next to her on the couch. “There’s a whole other cushion, mate.”

“Budge over, I want to put my feet up, too.” Pinto crowded Warlock further into the corner, kicking off her trainers to reveal mismatched socks, and patted the couch on her other side. “Join us, Karen.”

“I’m still looking at the creepy crawlies.” And she was--she’d moved on to the millipedes, and their multitude of legs which occasionally gave even Warlock pause. A shiver ran down her spine, but her voice was calm as she asked, “How long do they live?”

“Up to ten years, generally.”

“Do you ever take them out?”

“We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

“God, you’re weird," Pinto said. She’d known Warlock for less than twelve hours and already sounded inexplicably fond of her idiosyncrasies, on top of her usual cheer.

“I’m weird? You want to be a journalist so you can _change the world_.” Warlock picked at nonexistent dirt beneath her fingernails, sniffing judgmentally. “Shouldn’t you want to be famous or earn awards, or something?”

Pinto snapped her fingers. “Right; nihilist. Don’t think the world can change, hm? Or it will it just not matter if it does?”

“I’d much rather be of the opinion that nothing is important- and therefore everything is- than that only some things are important and everything else can suck it.” Warlock turned to look over her shoulder, watching Karen watch the axolotl where she floated merrily beneath the leafy fronds of whatever aquatic flora the webforum had suggested Warlock invest in. “It’s what makes me a good witch. And a meticulous keeper of unconventional pets."

Karen straightened, setting her hands on her hips as she declared, “I like this one. Does it have a name?”

“Bernice. She’s only three, so she could live another decade, or possibly two.”

“I don’t really think magic is real,” she added, apologetically, and finally joined them on the couch (shooting the tanks with the tarantula and the preying mantis a distrustful glance as she gave them ample berth). “My cousins made me do that whole Bloody Mary thing one time, and it scared the daylights out of me when they started banging on the door afterwards, but I still knew it was them.”

“I totally believe in ghosts," Pinto declared.

Warlock scoffed. _She_ didn't believe in ghosts, or at least not the kind that haunted anything more than people's consciences. (She hadn't the experience, personally, but she'd seen it happen.) “Ghosts aren’t really a thing, Pinto.”

“What, who says? Sometimes I hear things moving around my parents’ house at night and I think, ‘yeah, that could be some kind of ghoul’.” She made a motion with her fingers, as if to indicate spookiness, and wiggled her eyebrows. This was less of a statement of a belief than of a willingness to believe, which was something Warlock had already noticed about Pinto.

She desperately wanted something to believe in, and she seemed, for whatever reason, to be considering investing in three possibilities in particular:

  1. the innate goodness of humanity
  2. the existence of the paranormal, and
  3. Warlock Dowling.

“How old is your parents’ house, Pinto?” Karen asked. It was hard to say if she was searching for solid ground, or merely humoring her new roommate.

“It’s a farmhouse from the eighteen hundreds, or something.” Pinto did dramatic jazz hands. “Totally legit someone could have died there!”

“People _could_ have died anywhere," Warlock said patiently, "and given the whole of history, probably someone _has_ died just about everywhere, except maybe most of Antarctica. But your parents live in a two hundred year old house,_ of course_ you hear shit at night. Wood expands and contracts with temperature and humidity, you know.”

"I'm sorry, is the witch being the skeptic right now? Yank the other one."

"Charming." Karen nudged Pinto with her elbow. "I was promised food in exchange for doing the dishes, you know."

"It's not even five PM!"

"By the time you're done, it'll be a reasonably human time to eat."

Pinto pursed her lips, fingers drumming on the couch cushions as she shot a narrow eyed glance to her left. "Are your kitchen implements as swanky as the rest of this place?"

Warlock gazed back at her steadily. "What answer would make you feel better?"

"Touché." Pinto got up from the couch, nabbing the remote for Warlock's modestly sized smart TV as she went. Her tongue stuck slightly out from between her teeth as she deciphered the vast array of buttons, and she explained, "I refuse to work under these conditions.”

(Apparently this meant she intended to play music via Youtube.)

She also proceeded to open every cabinet in Warlock's kitchen, just to see what she was working with, and bopped along to some pop song or other along the way. Warlock watched her for a moment, chin resting on her own forearm and something deeply confused and quietly entertained rumbling around her chest.

"University has been a bit bizarre so far," Karen commented, drawing Warlock's attention away from the kitchen.

Karen was hard to read, curious and hesitant and polite and a tad standoffish, all at once. Warlock supposed she had very little room to judge, as she had done nothing but be vaguely aloof and sardonic since her guests had arrived. Somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, her mother was furious that she'd forgotten to offer them a drink the moment they walked in the door.

“You’re a first year uni student as well, I assume?” Warlock asked, ignoring the gyration of Brendon Urie’s hips on the TV.

“Mm. All in pursuit of that starving artist aesthetic,” Karen declared, and Warlock tipped an imaginary hat to a kindred spirit. (Not, of course, that Warlock would ever be starving, with the sort of trust fund she had--not unless her father got up the guts to disown her.)

“You draw?”

“I paint.”

“I’m shocked.”

“How so?”

“Your blouse is white.”

“People can _change clothes_, you know.” Karen’s gaze flicked over Warlock, taking in the boots and the ripped black jeans and the somber flannel and considering them in light of her insistent title of “witch”. She smirked. “Well, perhaps _you_ don’t.”

Warlock flushed red with a pulse of embarrassment, and covered it by twisting in her seat, barking out sharply, “Watch yourself, Pinto!”

Her newest and only best friend froze, hand a centimeter from the burner. “Shit, thanks.” She moved the cast iron pan from the burner she’d _thought_ she’d turned on, to the one she actually had. “Eagle eye. How’d you see that, all the way over there?”

“I’ve a sixth sense for stupidity,” she answered blithely.

“Sounds useless.”

“Not hardly.”

“But doesn’t it get annoying, going off every time you’re in your own presence?”

Warlock made a noise, low in the back of her throat. “Is that how this is going to be?” she asked, faking insult to cover how utterly delighted she was. _There_ was the promised Pintovian wit.

“It’s what best friends are for.” Pinto shoved her fist slightly into the air in a sarcastic sort of salute, and then she grinned, wide and white and crinkling up her slightly crooked nose, as she turned back to the stovetop. “Back me up, Karen!”

“Yeah,” Karen said. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to Pinto; she was watching Warlock with a hazy kind of suspicion. It was the kind that came from _knowing _that she had watched Warlock turn around specifically to give the warning, rather than give it because she’d happened to turn around, but she wasn’t really willing to believe herself on the subject.

Warlock offered her a smile--the kind that came with a few too many teeth and had been practiced carefully in the mirror through the whole of her American high school experience. “So are you a watercolor kind of girl, or do you prefer oil paints?”

“Whatever, really,” she said weakly. “How did you--”

“I’m a witch.”

“That’s not the answer you seem to think it is!”

She shrugged. “It’s the _only_ answer there is.” And it was: she was a witch, so she knew things. She noticed things.

“Oh, woe is me! I need a lady knight in shitty black jeans to come to my rescue!”

Sometimes, she opened jars of pesto for overdramatic journalism majors.

* * *

Warlock Dowling may have been a witch, but she was not, in the grand scheme of things, a naturally _powerful_ witch. She would never be capable of, say, sensing ley lines, or of brewing a love potion, or of healing so much as a papercut. The spark of power within her was so minute as to have been unnoticeable, had her childhood not predisposed her towards a belief in its existence, and it was sheer stubbornness and dedication which had allowed her to fan that spark into an especially modest flame.

She was not inclined towards precognition; merely to momentary flashes of insight into the world around her. An unheard footstep on the landing heralding Pinto’s arrival at her door; that particular creaking noise of an overheated burner sending a pulse of adrenaline into her heart.

So tucking the occasional business card into a library book or the lip of a mirror in a public restroom or the bulletin board of a dorm she didn’t live in was certainly not a matter of prophecy--”An younge wymon shall finde thee at thyme of herr most dearest need”, or something of the sort.

Warlock was simply of the opinion that, occasionally, people needed help, and sometimes she was in a position to help them. Magic wasn’t necessary for that, generally; so what if she couldn’t heal a papercut? That was why she kept plasters in her wallet.

She was also good for a lift when you found yourself a bit drunker than you intended, or for a place to crash when your boyfriend turned out to not be as nice as you’d thought him, or for a shoulder to cry on when your studies were getting a bit overwhelming.

People would see that white little card with its empty space and simple phone number, and somehow they would recognize it for the outstretched hand that it was; that was magic. When they decided to reach back, that was magic. There was no prophecy guiding her, and of that, Warlock was certain.

There was a sort of faith in the action, though.

She printed them in sets of fifty, because that was the best price available per card through the online retailer she ordered them from, and in an afternoon of procrastination from the essay she should have been writing, she had found places for a full forty-nine of them, across campus and the nearby Soho neighborhood. Most of them would probably end up in a trash bin or blown across the lawn and down the gutter, and others would result in crank calls because uni students and party scene twenty-somethings alike were a specific brand of bastard. But some of them would reach people who needed them, and that was all that mattered.

Warlock flicked her thumb at the corner of the fiftieth, chewing at the inside of her lip, and- with a huff, rolling her eyes at herself- stepped off the curb in front of some dingy bookstore to tuck the card beneath the wiper of an annoyingly familiar vintage car. She tried not to question her own motives too closely, hooking her thumbs in her pockets as she determinedly strode the other way back towards campus.

Maybe the owner would give her a call and she’d get a chance to chew their ear off for repeatedly stealing her parking spot, or something.

* * *

Contrary to popular belief (and by "popular", Warlock just meant Pinto's), she had not challenged Pinto's ability to carry eighteen-year-old witches down the streets of London. _All_ she'd said was that her best friend was a bit on the short side; that was neither a moral judgment nor an intended slight, and didn't mean she wasn't still clearly an athletic person or that she didn't wear sensible shoes. It made sense.

The fact that Warlock had somehow agreed to being carried piggyback did not.

"You have too much hair," she complained, brushing it away from her nose for the third time in as many blocks. Pinto's bony hips dug into her thighs, and Warlock's boots may as well have been dragging the ground; if there was one thing she could be accused of, it was being mostly leg. "How much farther before your ego can take putting me down?"

"How much farther before _your_ ego can only take _being_ put down?"

Warlock sighed. "A stalemate then."

Pinto snickered. "Where's Karen with a little impulse control when you need her?"

"Throwing paint at a canvas and calling it art."

"Literally?"

"I'm not a snob. Of course literally."

"That's true. You're kind of aggressively not a snob, actually. What's _that_ about?"

Her mother was a patron of the arts who cared distinctly less about the arts themselves than the status of being a patron. In growing up, Warlock had found that she could enjoy a bit of classic architecture with the best of them, but that there was a much fiercer sort of joy to be found in the culture of the masses, especially when it intersected with the mood of the times and whipped upwards into a zeitgeist of passion and politics and that oh-so-human condition. _That_ was what endured. _That_ was what mattered.

Warlock shrugged, making sure Pinto could feel the motion. "Teenage rebellion."

"Nice." Pinto hitched Warlock a bit higher on her hips, with hands that could be described as “small and strong”, but were most accurately described as only somewhat small and quite _scarily_ strong. "Hey, remember that time I asked you about tarot cards and you said they were a crock of shit?"

"As I recall, the question was less about the cards themselves and more about whether or not I was in pursuit of a trendy witchcraft aesthetic as opposed to actively practicing magic, and I never used the phrase 'crock of shit'."

"Oh. Er, _are_ they a crock of shit?"

"In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing and isn't trying to scam you, no."

"Do you--"

"Kind of rubbish at them."

"Right then. My point was--"

"You never have a point."

"I always have a point."

"Your pocket knife doesn't count."

"I'm going to drop you."

"_Please_."

"Well, then I'm _not_ going to drop you."

Warlock heaved a sigh, as obnoxiously loudly as she could and right in Pinto's ear, but she continued to hold on with one arm loosely about her shoulders. "I could ask around if you wanted; I'm sure someone in the community back home could point me in the direction of a proper tarot reader."

"Oh, no, that's fine. I like my future obscure and undetermined. Schrödinger's dessert menu choices, etcetera."

"Sure, _that_ means something to me."

Patiently, Pinto elaborated, "I exist in a state of always being prepared to order cheesecake, but I shan't know whether or not I'm actually going to until I've looked at the menu and found out if the restaurant even serves it."

"Sensible, if not strictly analogical."

"I was going to ask about seànces, actually."

“You know it wasn’t--”

“_Yes_, I know it wasn’t a literal cat, Warlock.”

"Then what, for the ghosts in your parents' farmhouse?"

"For Youtube, mostly."

"You’ve lost me."

"Quite a while ago it seems. Look, I think it could make a fun comedy series, even if we don't find anything properly supernatural--I bring the wit, you bring the expertise, Karen brings the camera--"

"Is this just a scheme to get us to hang out together? As if we don't see each other enough."

It was a bit selfish, in that way that was very human and very hard to pass judgment on, but she felt smugly pleased every time she considered the fact that, while Pinto and Karen shared that particular bond that was being roommates while actually _liking_ one another, _Warlock_ was the one Pinto claimed as a best friend. So she never turned down dinner, or lunch, or a surprise visit at the flat, or a summons away from the campus library and over to Soho. They saw each other nearly every day, and sometimes twice.

Warlock had spent more time with Pinto in the last three weeks than she had with her mother in the last eighteen years, or at least it felt that way.

Pinto snapped her fingers. "That reminds me, you should give me a key to your flat."

"Going to have dinner waiting for me when I get home like a fifties housewife?"

"I'm feeding you beans and toast for a week straight if you keep it up." Pinto made use of the ripped knees of her baggy jeans to pinch her, sharply, and Warlock yelped.

"Oi!"

"Turn me into a millipede, witchy woman," Pinto taunted. "If you got the guts and the game for it."

"I have plenty of millipedes. I'd turn you into a frog; you can never have too many frogs." Such a thing was quite outside of Warlock's wheelhouse, but she found it deeply entertaining the way Pinto stumbled, for just a moment, as if considering whether or not she was serious.

"Haha," Pinto finally said. It lacked a bit of her usual fervor. "Look, you live alone. It's a good idea, handing a spare to a trusted second party in case you leave the stove on and can't get home to deal with it or you lock yourself out--"

"I could let myself back in," Warlock said, with thin amusement.

"Well, yes, there is the building super--"

"I said _I_ could let myself in."

"Of course. You're a witch; you can unlock doors with your mind.” Rolling your eyes was an inaudible action, but Pinto managed to project it through her voice anyway. It was one of her many talents.

"If that's what you want to call my lockpicks, sure."

"You're _kidding_."

"My nanny called it a crucial life skill."

"Your childhood was bizarre. Can I have a key or not?"

"Yeah, sure." Warlock carefully smoothed down Pinto's hair with one hand, leaving it in place, and rested her chin atop it. She was, at this point, a bit impressed in spite of herself at how far she'd been carried. After a moment's hesitation, the words unfamiliar on her tongue, she added, "What are best friends for?"

"They're for running a paranormal comedy Youtube channel so their journalistically inclined counterpart can practice their research skills and talking in front of a camera?" Pinto said hopefully.

"Oh, the truth _sure is out there_, hm? 'It'll be fun, Warlock!' And now suddenly it's all about your career--"

"It can be _both_, you know. The world is more than black and white."

Warlock quieted abruptly. "Yes, it is."

"Right," Pinto said slowly. She was good at reading people, and Warlock in particular. She seemed to sense the landmine in front of them, without having the slightest idea of what it was about. Her grip on Warlock's legs loosened, letting her finally drop to the ground. "Right, but, you know I shan't make you. Say the word, and I'll drop the idea faster than--"

"No, I mean." Warlock cleared her throat, shoving her hands in her pockets and staring resolutely out into space. "It _could_ be fun. If Karen's in, I'm--" she paused, Pinto's statement replaying in her mind. "Wait, sorry, what research do you need to do for a seànce, if I'm the one providing the technical expertise?"

"Ah!" Pinto's face brightened, and she shoved her arm through Warlock's, dragging her off once more. "I may have misrepresented my idea a _bit_."

"A bit," Warlock echoed.

"Just a _tad_. But you'll like this more, I promise--helping people is what witches do, right, even if the help people need isn't the help they want?" She pressed her phone into Warlock's hand, a broad smile tugging across her face. "I'm still working on the website."

** _PARANORMAL ACTIVITY? DON'T SWEAT IT. WE'VE GOT A WITCH._ **

_Tongue-in-cheek paranormal investigative services. Just because we're cracking jokes doesn't mean we aren't also busting ghosts--assuming that's even the problem in the first place._

"For the hatred of everything holy and the love of everything damned," Warlock said, blankly. "We're going to get sued."


	2. Fuck the Mind-Body Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "That doesn't mean it can't still suck," Karen murmured, with a quiet sort of empathy.
> 
> Warlock squinted at her for a moment, then dropped her umbrella as a flood of exasperation swelled through her veins. "Oh, good God. Do we all have Daddy Issues?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The girls get into some pretty heavy discussions during this chapter, folks. Nothing is described in more than vague detail and nothing happens in the present day, but there are allusions to child abuse and transphobia in this chapter.
> 
> There's also a scene where Warlock helps a girl get away from a creep at a bar, though again it's very tame--nothing either verbally or physically violent occurs or is even heavily implied.
> 
> Detailed info on how to avoid stuff located in the end notes for the chapter

Karen was cross-legged on the floor and leaning forward, elbows on her knees, while Pinto sprawled on her back on the rug, feet kicked up on the couch, and Warlock tended to the terrariums. “You want to start investigating the supernatural,” she said incredulously. “Like--like the Ghostbusters, or something--”

“Only incompetent,” Warlock interjected dryly. The tarantula was ignoring her crickets for now, but that was fine. She’d catch them all eventually. “So really, more like Scooby Doo and the rest of the Mystery Gang.”

“I call Daphne,” Pinto piped in.

Karen stubbornly continued talking, more loudly, over the both of them. “--So that crazy people all over the city will call us in, and then you’ll dig up a bit of dirt about their apartment buildings and spin some stupid story about spurned lovers in the seventeen-fifties, or whatever, and then you want to spend the night there and make idiots of yourselves--”

“Actually, Warlock gets to be the comedic straight woman.” A brown hand waved lazily, sarcastically through the air. “You know, so to speak.”

“--and post it all up on a _comedy Youtube channel_. You know, where your clients will see you making fun of them and come murder you in your sleep!”

“You forgot the bit where everyone involved knows from the start exactly what this is,” Pinto said patiently. “It’s tongue-in-cheek, says it right on the website. We’re looking for, like, bored millennials and gen z’s who think it’s funny to send in ‘I think a gremlin’s living in my flat, my ice cream keeps going missing and it’s _definitely _not my roommate, no sirree’, not ‘I did a little cocaine and now I’m being haunted by a malevolent poltergeist who leaves red welts on my skin at night’, or ‘my son kissed a boy so I think he’s possessed by a demon’.”

“Actually, I’ll take that last,” Warlock said darkly, refreshing the water dish in the frogs’ tank. “Turn it over to child protective services.”

“Amen to that. But you know what I mean.”

“The fact remains that this is a _terrible_ idea,” Karen told Pinto, reaching out to jostle her shoulder with one hand. “Who even has the time, between the researching and the filming and the editing--we’re talking hours and hours and _hours_ of work, for maybe a ten or fifteen minute video. And we’re all in uni! You haven’t _forgotten_ that, have you?”

“It’ll be fun,” she said firmly, and caught Karen’s hand, smiling crookedly over at her with the full force of that quintessentially Gertrude “Pinto” Bernard humor and cheer. “I’ll do most of the fiddly bits.”

"Fiddly bits," Karen repeated. She ran a hand through her mousey brown hair, looking disgusted and exasperated and long suffering all at once. There was also something resigned, and something a little fond, in her gaze as she squeezed Pinto's hand back. "Good God."

"If I were you, I'd be more hung up on that 'most'," Warlock said. A shrewd observation, in her opinion, but Pinto did not appear to agree.

A sock- striped and undoubtedly entirely unlike the compatriot it left behind- soared through the air like an avenging angel, only to land, limply, on Warlock's shoulder. She picked it off with two fingers and made a face, tossing it back over the couch in Pinto's general direction. "What are you," she asked derisively, "eleven?"

“I was never eleven. I sprung, fully formed, from my mother’s forehead. A modern Athena, but prettier and cooler and ambiguously multiracial.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be your father’s forehead?” Warlock fired back, just as sarcastically.

Silence fell over the flat.

It was heavy, the awkward sort of tension that comes from the anticipation of a friendly jibe that never comes; silence all the more deafening for how _unnatural_ it was.

Pinto, without a comeback. Pinto, with a uniquely blank expression on her face when Warlock carefully closed the lid of the salamanders’ terrarium and turned to look at her.

“Nah,” Pinto said, finally.

“Alright,” Warlock said.

Pinto swallowed heavily, once, as she sat up, her mess of brown curls cascading down over her shoulders as she reached for her sock and pulled it back on. “My stepfather is the shit, though. In the, like. The good way.”

“Alright,” Warlock repeated.

“He taught me how to fence.”

“En garde?” Karen offered.

“Warlock’s a member of the bourgeoisie; she probably knows how to fence.” Pinto was warming back up, her voice a touch shaky and her smile a little awkward and a little crooked as she peered up at her best friend.

Far be it for Warlock to disappoint. “Sure,” she said flippantly, holding out a hand to pull Pinto to her feet. “I mean, it’s not like it was taught at school or anything; I did spend middle and high school in Chicago, and gym class there is a lot of bowling and wiffle ball and football--not that kind, sorry, Karen.”

“Fucking Americans,” Karen sniffed. She’d been playing footie since she was a young girl, and had strong opinions on the fact that the United States had co-opted the term to refer to a sport where one didn’t even actively _use their feet_.

“But the gardener taught me, when we still lived in England.” She rolled her eyes before anything could be said. “_Yes_, we had a gardener. Yes, we’re just so rich. Anyway, funny bloke, awfully fond of slugs. Pacifist with a spine of pure stainless steel." She flung open the hall closet, making a quiet noise of satisfaction as she reached inside. "Are we going to do this or what?”

Pinto threw her head back laughing. “Your childhood is a source of endless fascination to me,” she said, giddy, as she caught with one hand the umbrella tossed at her. (Warlock tried not to feel guilty that she'd been a bit too preoccupied to show interest of her own, and silently resolved to be better at the whole friend thing from now on.) Pinto gave a few experimental swings of the umbrella, her tongue poking out between her teeth as she concentrated, and then declared, “Good thing we already moved the coffee table for rug lounging purposes.”

Karen scowled at the socked foot prodding her in the thigh, and refused to get up and out of the way. "If you two are going to be fools, you're not going to force me to move in the process. And I'd like to point out that stainless steel is by its very nature _not_ pure; it's iron bonded with, like, carbon and chromium and such--"

"Methinks she doth protest too much."

"At least in this case she's probably right," Warlock said fairly. She took up a fencing stance, although she didn't bother with holding too closely to form. That was _hardly_ the purpose here. She offered a testing jab, and was refuted by a cheeky parry and a bit of footwork.

Oh, lovely. They really did both know what they were doing--that made things much more _fun._

"Rules of engagement?" she asked calmly.

"Not the face?" Pinto suggested. "Or the knees; finicky things, knees."

Abruptly, she unleashed a flurry of blows, fencing with her usual verve and enthusiasm, as well as an added cutthroat determination, and Warlock quickly went on the defensive.

"Outlaws!" Pinto cried excitedly. "We need those little Robin Hood hats, with the feathers! Brigands! Fiends!"

"Idiots!" Karen yelped, jerking out of the way of a wild swing, and scrambled onto and then over the couch. "If I agree to your stupid Youtube channel, will you stop?!?"

They paused.

Warlock was panting just a bit, strands of blonde escaping her plait, and her umbrella looked rather as if it would no longer be capable of doing its job. "Up to you," she said.

Pinto was taking advantage of the break to tug her socks back up her shins from where they'd slipped down around her ankles. They really didn't match; the one was striped, and the other covered in UFOs. "I could be convinced," she said thoughtfully, and rolled her jeans back down. "Are you both free next weekend? We could go out to the country, do a test run on my parents' farmhouse."

She caught the glance exchanged between Karen and Warlock, and rolled her eyes. "When I say 'my parents', I mean my mom and my stepdad. Always. Don't worry about the other stuff, it was forever ago."

"That doesn't mean it can't still suck," Karen murmured, with a quiet sort of empathy.

Warlock squinted at her for a moment, then dropped her umbrella as a flood of exasperation swelled through her veins. "Oh, good God. Do we _all_ have Daddy Issues?"

"Um." Karen picked at the seam of the couch, mouth twisting vaguely as she glanced down and away. There was nothing fragile about her, and Warlock wouldn't dream of saying so--but for a moment she looked somewhere on the edge of defeated. "Well, I wouldn't put it like _that_."

"Cheers to childhood trauma bonding us in late adolescence," Pinto said solemnly. "Let's order pizza and talk logistics. I'm thinking--"

_Rrrrrring. Rrrrrring. Rrrrrring._

Karen jerked away from the landline on its little table between Bernice and the frogs, her face twisting in horror as she clutched her hands to her chest. "That thing _works_?"

"Did you think it was an aesthetic decision?" Warlock asked, bemused.

"Who has a landline in this day and age?" Pinto hovered over her shoulder (or rather, somewhat under it), umbrella dangling forgotten from one hand.

"I use it to screen calls," she explained, as it clicked over to the machine. Telemarketer, crank call, or--

"_Um, hello. This is Mary."_ The voice was a little hushed, a little anxious. "_I just--there's this guy, and he--he's not doing anything, really, but I--he's making me nervous, and he won't leave me alone, and none of my friends are picking up. I found your card… I don't really know, but I guess I just thought--_"

Warlock picked up the call.

"You thought correctly," she cut in smoothly, phone between her ear and her shoulder as she shoved her wallet and her keys into her pockets. "Where are you? Alright. Yeah, I know where it is. I can be there in ten." Less if she took the Vespa down some alleys she wasn't really supposed to. "I've got blonde hair in a braid, I'm a little over six foot, and I'm wearing grey sweatpants and a dark purple flannel shirt. Turn the conversation to something innocuous, maybe a movie you've seen recently, don't give him your number- make one up if you have to- and don't leave with him. Position yourself so you can see the door over his shoulder, but don't watch it. Just try and stay calm, and I'll call you when I'm outside. When you feel your phone buzz, tell him you just spotted a friend and you're going to go say 'hi' real quick." She paused partway through tugging her boots on, listening. "Don't worry about that; I'll take care of it. Okay?"

The girl on the other end of the line let out a shaky breath. "_Okay_."

"Or…" Warlock scratched at her nose, looking down at Karen and Pinto's quiet expressions. She'd never done this with _back up_ before. "If you want to stay in the bathroom until I get there, I've got some friends who can stay on the line with you." There were risks, either way--one put her directly in front of him, trying to keep him from being suspicious, but the other more directly violated unspoken social contracts while still leaving her within potential reach.

"_No, I--I think I can play it cool_."

"You don't have to if you don't want to, Mary."

"_I'm sure_," she said, firmly. "_See you in ten._" And then she hung up.

Warlock blew out a breath, tossing the phone aside, and finished putting on her boots. "I'll probably be about an hour," she said, and took a quick picture of Mary's number on the caller ID. It mostly depended on how far the girl lived from the swanky bar she'd named, and how uncomfortable she was riding shotgun on a motor scooter. "You can go ahead and order takeaway, if you want. There's some cash under the lid of the tarantula's tank--"

"That's the worst thing you've ever said to me," Pinto said, though she sounded more bizarrely fascinated than anything. She shook her head slightly, changing focus forcibly. "Do you just leave your phone number in random bars for frightened women to use you as a free Uber?"

"There's a _little_ more to it than that. Look, if you want to stay and wait for me, I'll explain when I get back; just make sure you don't let Trudy out, if you decide to go for the cash."

"Trudy the Tarantula," Pinto said wonderingly.

"God," Karen muttered, dry but fond. "It's like you two are platonic soulmates."

"If we're both single when we're fifty, we're getting married," Pinto agreed flippantly. “I may be straight, but I know a quality life partner when I see one.”

Warlock fumbled the doorknob, flashing a somewhat tight smile back over her shoulder. Pinto had only known her for a few weeks; thirty years of friendship was a lot for her to promise, even as a joke.

“Lock the door if you decide to leave,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say, and slipped out the door towards the stairs. She took them two at a time, heavy boots pounding and keys jingling with every leap. That same little old lady- the one who liked to ignore small talk- opened her door just to express her opinion of the racket with a disapproving glower and haughty sniff.

"If you wanna report someone in this building to management, how about whoever it is who keeps chucking potted plants out the window?" Warlock snapped, and the octogenarian slammed her door closed once more.

Handling the scene at the bar was comparatively tranquil--particularly after all the honking and the yelling as Warlock swerved in and out of traffic and cut the wrong way up one way alleyways.

She pushed open the door, her mobile still ringing in her other hand, and there was a woman, maybe a few years older than her and already maneuvering through the crowd, whose face broke out into desperate relief. "Thank God," she seemed to say to herself; Warlock nodded, her smile friendly and calming as her eyes sought out the man at the bar whose eyes tracked Mary.

"You can't see her any more," she told him quietly. No one could hear her over the gentle jazz playing in the bar, but he blinked, his own smile sliding off of his face, and looked around as if trying to spot someone he'd lost. He found Warlock instead.

She smiled at him, ushering Mary out around her, and for one second--

For one split second--

The light flashing off of a glass being scrubbed by the bartender hit her just right, and there were too many teeth in her mouth, stretching too long past blood red lips, taking up too much space beneath too dark, too flat eyes.

Warlock closed the door. Hopefully the illusion would make him think twice the next time he wanted to terrorize some woman--buy probably it wouldn't. There wasn't much more she could do, unless she was prepared to dip her toes into hardcore vigilanteism. She handed Mary the helmet.

"Don't worry about it," she said firmly, before the thanks could slip past trembling lips, and swung her leg over the Vespa. "Where are we headed?"

"I don't even know your name," Mary said, breathless, at the next red light. Her hands were locked together, her elbows pressing in nervous and tight at Warlock's narrow hips.

"Lilith," Warlock told her dryly. "Tell all your friends."

* * *

"Just be yourself," Karen suggested. She had a nice video camera in hand and her hair pulled back from her face with a thin, metallic gold headband, though the sun washed everything grey in the thin light of daybreak. She could have been carved from stone, right down to the unsympathetic smirk which lurked in the corners of her mouth.

"'Hi, I'm Warlock, and I don't want to be here!'" Warlock punctuated the words with a peppy little arm motion and an awkward smile, the kind that went weird around the corners as if it had been held for too long. "Like that?" she added sardonically, tucking her hands into the pockets of her jeans- not ripped, for once- and hunching her shoulders slightly against the chill.

Their footprints left a trail through the dew of the fields behind them, Pinto's parents' farmhouse just visible in the distance with its peaked little gable peering over a gently sloping hill. It could have been sitting on Karen's shoulder, an austere wooden parakeet to go along with the whiskey sour glare the woman herself was levelling.

"You'd make a wonderful pirate," Warlock told her.

"Don't try and suck up _now_," Karen said scathingly. She had mastered the art of sounding angry but looking quite pleased. "I spent too long dragging you out of bed this morning to be wooed."

Warlock flushed, faintly, and ignored the implication that there was any _wooing_ going on. "Yes," she fired back defensively, "I had to be dragged because I don't feel _comfortable_ with this."

"This" not being filming the Youtube video, so much as filming the Youtube video _here_.

"I told you, great-great-how-many-ever-greats grandpa Willie really doesn't care." Pinto patted the tombstone between them with a fond hand. The stone was worn down to illegibility by time and grown over with moss, and the gnarled tree it sat under listed moodily to one side. It was the kind of visual that looked as if a particularly clichéd set designer had stuck it in the background of a movie; it belonged in a story, or a dream, not within the rules and regulations of the waking world. "He's glad for the company, I'm sure," Pinto said confidently. "I used to hang out here every Halloween."

Warlock was fairly certain the man buried here was not in any way actually related to the Bernards, given that they'd only bought the farmhouse sometime in the eighties, well after the actual "farm" part of the property had been largely split away, but she was much too polite to say so.

"He's really rather non-sentient these days, I should expect," Warlock muttered. She felt quite impolite, regardless--it was like trespassing unknown in a church whose doors were theoretically open to the public at all hours of the day and night. Technically you _could_, but that didn't mean you should. "Which is probably for the best," she added, "because nineteenth century farmers are rarely thrilled about trans lesbian witches dancing on their graves."

"I don't think you've ever danced in your life," Pinto told her derisively. "Now buck up, we've got to start film--"

"Oh, we're already filming." Karen tilted her face out from behind the camera, one eyebrow arching in a taunt. "Candid camera, darlings. Keep up the banter, it's the closest thing you've got to charm."

"Lovely," Warlock said dryly. She tipped her head back, plaited hair tickling down her back and chin pointing to the cloud blanketed sky. Her words were addressed that direction, sour but amused. "I was hoping heckling would be a part of my day."

"Shut up and introduce yourselves."

They exchanged a look, Warlock's eyebrows shooting briefly high, and then Pinto beamed and turned back to the camera.

Warlock suddenly understood just why Pinto wanted a chance to practice speaking in front of a camera--it wasn't that she had a bad public speaking voice, so much as that she sounded a bit like a meteorologist testing out a new career in internet comedy. She sounded almost gratingly practiced, though also charmingly enthusiastic.

"My name is Pinto Bernard, and I'm one of the hosts of 'We've got a Witch.' I'm not a witch, but I'm _not_ this program's skeptic, either. I do believe in ghosts." Wisps of hair caught in the breeze and framed her face; that broad, dimpled smile.

Warlock straightened her shoulders nervously, trying not to sound sarcastic as she told the camera, "My name is Warlock Dowling, your other host, and I think ghosts are- to borrow a turn of phrase from a dear friend- 'a crock of shit'."

"She's the witch," Pinto added.

"She's the dear friend."

Pinto patted the gravestone again, humming approvingly. "And _this_ is Willie Lumpkin--"

"Isn't--" Warlock paused. Turned a narrow eyed frown onto a suspiciously innocent Pinto. "Isn't Willie Lumpkin the Fantastic Four's mailman?"

"Sure." The smile flashed was beatific.

"But--"

"Well, his first name is _certainly_ Willie, and the rest is a bit illegible, so when I was ten, I decided to call him Willie Lumpkin--"

"Move along, ladies," Karen advised. "Unless you want the whole world to be firmly aware of what massive nerds you are."

"We're here today in the English countryside, visiting the farmhouse where I grew up," Pinto said, and then there was a pause, as if she was waiting for someone else to chime in.

Dryly, Warlock gestured behind them and said, "She insists there are ghosts in them there hills."

Pinto burst into laughter.

It was wild and bright and most of all loud, even as it was swallowed and muffled by the slowly dispersing fog of the morning. "We're editing that out," she told Warlock, once she was done. She had to wipe a tear out of the corner of her eye.

"That's fair," Warlock agreed. She scratched her nose, and didn't really remember what she was supposed to say next. Something about their goal for the weekend?

"Nah," Karen said. Her granite smirk had softened, and her artist's hands stayed steady on the camera. "Keep it. I think that's going to be the heart and soul of these videos."

"What, me making a fool of myself?" Warlock tried not to sound as disgruntled as she felt.

"You two having fun and being _friends_," Karen snapped back exasperatedly. "Stop assuming we're always looking for reasons not to like you and get back on script, already."

Warlock flushed brightly red, dropping her gaze to the cold, wet ground. "I'm not," she said, and cringed at how petulant she sounded. Like a flashback to the horribly spoiled little child she'd been, before her father lost the interest her mother'd never bothered to have. "I just--"

There was nothing to say.

She forced back the words, swallowing hard--and familiar small-strong hands took her by the ribs to turn her to face away from the camera completely. "You're my best friend," Pinto told her firmly, a stubborn jut to her jaw. She straightened the collar of Warlock's flannel shirt, stretching well onto her tiptoes to do so. "Okay? You're my _best friend_. Look at this place. No one around for miles; there were only like ten other kids in my class and nine of them thought I was a weirdo--"

"You're _my_ best friend," Warlock echoed, a little desperate, and impulsively lunged forward to catch her in a hug. Pinto's feet left the ground and her breath left her lungs in a great gust of air, but she clutched Warlock back, right there on top of the grave of a centuries dead man who probably wasn't named Willie Lumpkin. "You're _my_ weirdo."

"Witchy woman," Pinto mumbled, her nose pressing uncomfortably against Warlock's neck. "You're my weirdo, too."

"Stop it," Karen said, a little thickly. She'd stopped recording around the time Warlock had gone uncharacteristically emotional, and used the back of the wrist holding the video camera to wipe at her nose. "You're going to make me cry."

Warlock held tighter to Pinto with one arm, and released her with the other to silently gesture Karen over. "You belong in this hug, too," she didn't have to voice, and Karen's smile was only a _little_ broken as she slotted herself into Warlock's side, a warm-slim presence beneath one shoulder. She got her arms around the both of them, and Pinto- precariously clinging to Warlock's shoulders- managed to wriggle one leg free to dysfunctionally hug her in turn.

"Your parents must think we're idiots."

Karen huffed hard enough to dislodge the strand of Pinto's hair that had found its way to her mouth. "Shut up and hold us, Warlock."

* * *

She tossed the ball from one hand to the other, frowning down at it. Sports used to be a thing she enjoyed, before certain peers had begun to take the position that getting beat by her meant that certain words should be flung about with abandon. _American private schools_, she thought sourly, _seem to think themselves above little things like Title IX or just generally moving forward in time from the nineteen-fifties_.

"I'm rusty," she admitted, tossing the football- the non-American kind- in the air and taking it down on her thigh. The timing wasn't quite right--it bounced a bit, rather than dropping to her feet, and getting it under control took another quick touch with the sneakers she'd had to dig out of the depths of her closet when Pinto had insisted she have something other than just combat boots for the weekend. Warlock grimaced. "You'll have to take it easy on me."

"Please. You'd get pissed if we did," Karen told her, scathing but amused. The late afternoon sun caught on the wispy little strands of hair that escaped her headband, and she looked fashionable even with her baggy gym shorts and oversized, faded t-shirt.

(There was just something, Warlock noted, about a woman who looked as if she were ready to take you to the cleaners and then graciously extend a hand to help you up off of the ground.)

"Maria has _no_ idea what she's doing, and I'm past my prime," Jerry added dryly. He was the stepdad, a genial middle aged man with that specific kind of softness about the middle that came only with age, not a lack of exercise or athleticism. "You'll hardly be the worst on the pitch."

"It's kind of you to make my downfall my incompetence, but I'm just as over the hill as you, my love," Maria teased. Pinto's mother was like looking forty years into the future: but for the deep smile lines framing her lips and the grey scattered through her ponytail, she was the spitting image of her daughter.

(On her worst days, Warlock looked into a mirror and saw only her father. She envied Pinto for not having to experience that, at the same time as she was fervently glad for it. That addendum was progress, she was pretty sure. One of these days she'd need to hire an actual therapist.)

"First blush says you and me--" Jerry motioned to Warlock-- "versus Karen and Maria should be a pretty even match up, but we can always mix up the teams later if it's not working out."

“Um,” Warlock said. Her skin felt a little tight and a little uncomfortable. Balanced skill levels be damned, she’d much rather be on Karen’s team. She didn’t--

That was to say--

It was all about confidence, see, and she was so much better at maintaining the image of confidence when there weren’t adults around who appeared to be interested in acting familial towards her.

Maria may have _looked_ like Pinto, but--well, Warlock had spent the last seven years developing a knee jerk asshole response to all attempts at motherly concern, because that wasn’t the _script_. She and her mother both knew exactly what their relationship was, and it was Warlock dressing nicely for the holidays and holding her tongue at dinner and getting free reign over her finances in exchange.

Jerry, likewise, seemed perfectly nice. He’d cooked them dinner the night before with a bright pink apron on, and the hug he’d pulled her into when they’d first arrived (and she’d been too awkward to say no) had been very warm. That didn’t stop him from making her… nervous. (Oh, to be the kind of witch who could grab that dusty broom leaning there against the shed and just fly away.)

No one noticed the way she froze up. No nudge of supernatural deflection needed--they were all looking at each other instead.

“We don’t have to actually play,” Karen pointed out anyway, because she was a goddess, risen from the English Channel and smelling faintly of paint thinner. “We could just kick the ball around a bit, y’know?”

“That sounds fine to me,” Warlock said, too rushed and too abrupt. She could feel her cheeks heating again, but she forced her posture to stay relaxed, forced herself to offer her usual lazy smile. "You know how I don't like to embarrass myself," she added flippantly, managing to hit the right tone to make Jerry laugh and Karen roll her eyes.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you pride is a sin?" Karen taunted back, but received the ball with a feather light touch when Warlock passed it to her and jogged back a bit to widen their circle.

"She's emotionally distant, not a _hypocrite_, Karen," Warlock snipped automatically, and then winced internally as Maria and Jerry exchanged concerned looks. She opened her mouth, trying to think of a way to claim she was kidding without being totally unconvincing, and felt a stab of relief as a sudden awareness of the crackling electricity in the air swept over her. "Bugger," she said, voice full of faux lament, "it's going to rain."

Maria glanced, skeptically, to the clear, late afternoon sky. "I don't think--"

Lightning struck, far off in the distance.

Warlock closed her eyes and counted the seconds.

There was a sense memory here--six years old and tucked under a warm pale arm, goosebumps sneaking over her clammy skin as a calm voice told the story of another storm. The gardener had sounded ancient, in that moment, and unbearably tired. Nanny had looked it, when a lightning flash found her watching them from the doorway. She must have come through the downpour looking for Warlock, who'd dashed for Brother Francis's little cottage when the sky tore open above her, but not a drop of water fell from her black overcoat.

Warlock opened her eyes as the thunder rumbled through the heavens.

"Still a couple of miles away," she said, swiping at her nose as if that could shake the scent of a late summer storm in the suburbs, or the imagined undertone of peppermint and black tea and the fresh cut lilacs in the vase on the kitchen table. "Er, kilometers," she corrected herself, feeling unsettled. "A good handful. We should still probably head in."

"Damn," Jerry said, peering into the distance as wind whipped up around them. "Storm clouds are literally on the horizon. Where the hell did those come from?"

Maria groaned, rubbing at her eyes with one callused hand. "They're always wrong on the news, this time of year--didn't say a peep about rain. I wouldn't've let Mitty and his friends go camping, if--"

"That's Pinto's brother," Jerry added helpfully.

"She's mentioned him." Warlock shoved her hands into the pockets of her sweats and gave a thin-lipped smile. His attention had immediately gone back to his wife, anyway.

"Rain gives a nice ambiance for the recording, tonight," Karen said. She was watching Warlock, with that little scrunch to her nose that said she was thinking very hard behind her patient brown eyes.

Warlock leaned towards her, voice low and teasing. "I don't control the weather, Karen."

She sniffed, flicking the ball up into her hands and stalking off for the house. "Of course you don't," she snapped. "Magic isn't real."

"Oh, it is," Warlock drawled, trailing after her as Maria and Jerry bickered over whether they needed to go check that all of the windows were up on the cars in the driveway. "I just can't control the weather."

"Only predict it," Karen huffed.

"I spotted the clouds," Warlock lied, taking the worn wooden steps in one bounding step to catch the door before it could close behind Karen--but she'd paused there on the threshold, white knuckling the doorknob, and suddenly they were very close, Karen's shoulder brushing Warlock's chest, and she sucked in a thoughtless breath. Paint thinner cleared the last cobwebby remnants of memory.

"You're a witch." Karen's voice was thready with frustration. "You tell us that all the time, but you make excuses--"

"I like the mystique," Warlock said awkwardly. "It's--entertaining. Watching you try and explain it away, and generally succeed. I'm not a very impressive witch or, well, person, when it comes down to it."

"I think you're brilliant," Karen said, color high in her cheeks. "I just also think you're delusional, and an asshole."

Warlock barked a laugh, and just as quickly clamped down on it. She ushered Karen inside with a light touch to her hip, unable to help the depth of amusement in her voice as she agreed, "That's fair."

The sky had darkened abruptly in the last few minutes, leaving the kitchen bathed in a single pool of warm orange light from the overhead. Pinto blinked owlishly up at them from within that glow, and then she yawned, back cracking as she straightened from her hunch. The blue-tinged light of her laptop screen glanced off of her glasses as she shoved idly at them, and asked, "What's fair?" in a voice raspy from disuse.

(Pinto vastly preferred contacts, so Warlock hadn't realized she even needed corrective lenses for some time--until she came barreling out of the bathroom one morning after crashing on Warlock’s couch, declaring she’d dropped her eyes down the sink and needed a lift home on the Vespa. But apparently the editing process was tedious enough without having to pause for eyedrops every few hours, so she had reluctantly doffed the lenses in favor of her glasses.)

Warlock closed the door with a click. "That I'm an asshole."

"Well, sure."

She snorted, kicking off her sneakers by the door and spinning the chair next to Pinto around so she could drop into it backwards. "How's the editing?" she asked, chin propped on her forearms.

"Fiddly bits almost handled, for the first half of the episode. What are you, the cool teacher from a nineties teen movie?"

"At least she's not Commander Riker," Karen said dryly, and Warlock shot her a smirk.

"Knew you were a nerd, too."

"She's the center point of a nerd-jock, prep-goth axis," Pinto said distractedly, "and we're opposite prep-jock/goth-nerd corners."

Warlock gasped, scandalized. "I'm not a goth!"

"You dress like one."

"When have you _ever_ seen me in eyeliner."

"I said 'goth', not emo--"

"I wear _flannel_\--"

"And combat boots."

"That's because I'm _gay_."

"What are the gays," Pinto said philosophically, "if not a bunch of past and future goths?"

"You're driving me to drink. You make me want to drink. I can't believe you're my best--" Warlock froze, staring into the camera that seemed to have magically appeared in Karen's hands. "Again?" she said weakly. "The sound's going to be terrible--we're not wired up."

"It's not my fault you're both ridiculous."

"Bonus content," Pinto added. She saved whatever she was working on and snapped her laptop shut with a gentle yet satisfying click.

"More fiddly bits," Warlock pointed out dryly, and lightning flashed like it was driving her point home. "Hey," she added, straightening up and beckoning at Karen. "Give me the camera."

"What?" Karen snapped the viewscreen closed and clutched the thing to her chest, a sudden deer in the headlights expression overtaking her face. "Why?"

"Bonus content," Warlock said, ruthlessly, and her brows dipped in concentration. She snapped her fingers--

Thunder boomed, closer than before. Karen shrieked with surprise, camera tumbling from her hands even as Warlock leaned sideways to catch it. With a single, smooth flourish, she brought it up and turned it on its master.

"I hate you," Karen wheezed, clutching at the countertop for support. "You're the worst person I know, I swear--"

"I don't control the weather, Karen," Warlock taunted. "If you'd been counting seconds you'd have known the thunder was coming, too."

"Karen Abbett, everyone," Pinto piped in. "Beloved 'We've Got a witch' camerawoman, with the acerbic wit of Wilde, the fantastical imagination of van Gogh--"

"And the eternal skepticism of Scully."

"Couldn't you have at least let me change from my workout clothes?" she complained.

"Quid pro quo. I mean, look at us--no flannel, and Pinto in her glasses." Warlock held the camera one handed, her chin on her other forearm on the back of the chair. "Give the people your perspective on the day, Karen."

She huffed, tugging her headband off and running a hand through her hair in a moderately successful attempt to neaten it. "What do you want me to say? Pinto rambled for an hour about eighteenth century burial rites, and you drew a lopsided circle on the floor and claimed it was a ghost trap, even though the fact that you don't even believe in ghosts is half the pastiche of the show."

"I do believe in cats," Warlock said thoughtlessly, and clicked her mouth shut around the rest of the words.

Karen squinted.

"Er," Warlock said. "Spoilers?"

"You think it's just some _cats in the barn_?" Pinto asked, sounding vaguely affronted.

"I'm afraid, dear audience," Warlock said with a sigh, "that I saw one this morning. Fluffy white thing, slinking around in the shadows.” She'd noticed it out of the corner of her eye when they'd been checking out the barn that morning (after leaving Mr. Lumpkin to his eternal rest), and she'd made up the "ghost trap" on the spot with a bit of sidewalk chalk. “The barn's a nice spot--plenty of warm nooks and crannies, and undoubtedly plenty of mice. There's probably several of them out there."

"And cats will lie in a square you've taped out on the floor, so why not a lopsided chalk circle?" Karen said shrewdly.

"I guess we _haunt_ the same circles on the internet."

"Don't make bad puns," Pinto told her sourly. "I'm miffed at you."

Karen chewed the inside of her lip, arms crossed tightly over her chest as she propped a hip on the Bernards' kitchen counter. "They'll do it even in the middle of a thunderstorm, you think?"

Warlock hesitated. She hadn't considered it, really--been too glad to have an excuse not to encourage any potential genial back-slapping or frustrated dirt-kicking from a male authority figure. "Well, probably not. I'm sure they've holed themselves up somewhere warm and dry."

Laughter rung out from just outside the door, and she straightened instinctively in her seat as Maria and Jerry came in the door. "'Lo, girls," Jerry greeted, with his broad, warm smile, and headed straight for the stove and its much-battered kettle.

"Warlock thinks our ghost is a cat," Pinto told them, shoving her glasses up her nose with a distracted nudge to the left corner of the frames. "What are your thoughts, as the owners of this house and the people with the most at stake, should she prove to be wrong and we accidentally anger an ancient and powerful spirit?"

“_Planning_ to do anything that would anger an ancient and powerful spirit?” Jerry asked dryly.

Pinto sniffed, her chin jutted stubbornly forward. “Might do. Never know when one might stumble onto a trapdoor and descend through a tunnel painted with bizarre, terrifying murals chronicling an evil inhuman presence that predates human hist--”

“Well, luckily we’re not being written by HP Lovecraft,” Maria cut in, with the kind of long suffering attitude that had circled past fond exasperation and all the way back to good-natured humor. "I'm still not even convinced we have a ghost. Or a cat. Or--" she gestured. "You know, ghost-like somethings a cat would explain."

“Yeah,” Karen said. “Besides, this setting’s a little more _Colour Out of Space_, don’t you think?”

"That was Maria Bernard, by the way," Warlock said from behind the camera. "You'd never have guessed, what with the extreme family resemblance and all, but she's Pinto's mum."

Maria winked dramatically. "Good evening, Youtube."

"What makes you think we don't have a ghost?" Pinto asked, forging ahead ruthlessly in the face of skepticism, and Warlock jumped as paintbrush callused fingers grazed over her own. She hadn't even noticed Karen slipping around the edge of the kitchen, but she let her gently take the camera and retreat to a corner where she could get all four of the others in the frame.

"Repeat that," she ordered.

Pinto flashed a grin and folded her hands one over the other, leaning forward with them on the table to ask her mother very seriously, "What makes you think we don't have a ghost?"

Maria leaned back against the counter, fingers drumming on the cabinets behind her. "I've never so much as noticed a mysteriously swaying curtain, much less a figure in the night. It's just an old house, love; it makes noises."

Pinto's nose crinkled in annoyance. "That's what Warlock said."

"Well, Warlock is a smart young woman."

She smiled slightly awkwardly. "Thanks, Mrs. Bernard." _That_, she told herself firmly, _should be the end of it. She's not _your_ mother; you can learn to let things_\--

"You do have cats, though; out in the barn," she said, and only managed to sound- or feel- vaguely apologetic about making the correction. Well, whatever. At least it hadn’t come out all waspish and rude.

"I doubt it," Jerry interjected, as the kettle began to whistle. He removed it from the stovetop, pouring water over the teabags waiting in five mugs on the counter. "We've never had a need for mousers, and I'd be surprised if any had wandered in, with how secluded we are."

Warlock did not grind her teeth, and she did not let her voice go petulant. "I saw one," she told him, steady and calm. "Must have come from somewhere."

He shrugged, and pressed a steaming mug of tea into his wife's hands, his smile crinkling warmly at the corners of his eyes when he looked at her. "It's always possible,” he said, in a voice that certainly wasn’t _meant_ to sound gratingly patronizing.

Lots of things are_ possible_, Warlock didn't say. I'm telling you this one already _happened_. She bit the inside of her lip, folded her arms over the back of her chair, and dug her pointed chin into them. Her slouch was a practiced thing of beauty. It told people to stop talking to her, so she would stop saying things she couldn’t help.

Fragrant steam rose from each of five mugs, scattered about the kitchen by Jerry's big, kind hands, and she tried to pretend there wasn't anything she'd like more in that moment than to fit inside her own skin.

* * *

"Favorite artist," Warlock said, a question as a statement.

The barn was dark and a bit damp and smelling vaguely of hay, though there was none around. But they'd laid out a tarp in the somewhat-warmer upper half-level, and covered it in a multitude of blankets and pillows and three sleeping bags all zipped up together into one great quilt, though they'd kicked the makeshift comforter off for the time being. It wasn't quite cold yet; it would get there, in the night.

Rain drummed lightly on the metal roof, with the storm having faded to a gloomy shower. Still, the clouds were enough to block out any chance of moonlight sneaking in a window, so the only things visible in the inky darkness within the barn were the little blinking lights of the recording equipment. There was infrared trained on the "ghost trap", and microphones trained on them.

(Possibly something would turn up in the night's audio, like on those ghost hunting shows Pinto had made them binge. Or perhaps it would just be more bonus content.)

Pinto's head rested on Warlock's stomach, and she made a considering noise. "I'm always too impatient for symbolism," she finally said, and the patter of the rain nearly swallowed her voice. Warlock's left leg was bent, cradling Pinto's shoulder in the crook of her hip. "And I'm not versed in the techniques; can't hardly tell a grand master from a particularly pretentious art student. Sorry, Karen."

Karen laughed, a quiet sound in the darkness. Her legs were extended full length, long and slender and crossed at the ankles, and placed delicately across Warlock's right shin in a casual sort of way that was anything but. They weren't talking about it. "No, you're not," she said.

"Not in the slightest," Pinto agreed. "But I thought you'd appreciate if I pretended. Look, my point is, don't really have a favorite. Um, van Gogh, maybe. I like sunflowers."

"Chihuly," Karen said, quietly.

"Not a painter?" Warlock blinked, though she couldn't tell the darkness of her eyelids apart from the darkness of the distant barn roof. She always had these _assumptions_ about Karen, and she was always wrong.

"I like that I can't, even theoretically, do what he does. And--I know it's not exactly the pretentious, hipster, starving artiste _thing_, to not whip out someone obscure and _bizarre_, or whatever, but the scale and the color and the vibrancy of his work…" she sighed. "It was the first time I think I really understood what art could be. And what it didn't _have_ to be."

"That's a nice thought," Warlock said. The appeal, she was sure, was obvious. She'd spent her childhood being molded- by her parents, by society, by Nanny and the gardener- into a person she wouldn't have recognized if she'd seen them in the mirror today.

"What about you?" There was a quiet noise, like long hair brushing over a pillowcase, like Karen turning to look at her, though it was too dark to see so much as the profile of Warlock's nose.

"What's the _Peanuts_ guy?" she asked blithely, and laughed along with Pinto as Karen blindly shoved at her shoulder. "Quit it, I'm delicate!"

"Are _not_."

"Whatever; it's your turn."

Karen scoffed, but- after a pause to consider- her tone was sincere as she asked, "Favorite book?"

Warlock pulled a face, not because anyone could see it but because it made her feel better. "I have to pick _one_?"

"That's the rules of the game," Pinto reminded her. "You made them up."

"Rules," she said, with no small hint of irony, "were made to be broken."

"Shut up and pick," Karen told her.

"The picturebook novelization of _Mulan_." Karen tried to hit her again, and Warlock laughed, catching her wrist to hold it still. "Alright, alright, I'm sorry. You only get a pass on your own questions, I know." She bit the inside of her lip, and thought about the grand library in her childhood home, the one she and her mother had left behind when they returned to America. What had she missed? No, more importantly--which ones had she stolen, because she'd never been allowed to read them before and here was her chance to spirit them away, puzzle through them again and again till she was old enough to grasp what they were getting at.

"_Mother Night_," she said. "It's dark; Vonnegut. The fictional memoirs of an American Nazi propagandist who'd been a spy. He's pardoned at the end of the book because he'd been doing what he'd been doing to help the Allies, but he commits suicide because he knows that he was still a Nazi, still spread evil, still cost people's lives, even if it had secret messages of good somewhere inside."

Karen hummed. "How very utilitarian."

"I suppose."

"Well," Pinto said, after a long, quiet moment. "That certainly brought the mood down."

"Sorry."

"Told you you were a goth."

"I swear to _God_, Pinto--"

They were both laughing--a little at her, a little with her, that wild and teasing sort of laughter that didn't know how to stop once it'd started. Warlock let her complaints subside with a heavy sigh, releasing her grip on Karen's wrist and dropping her own hand to the blanketed floor of the barn. "Favorite book; make it snappy."

"Ugh." Pinto forced down her giggles. Her head was a solid, comforting weight on Warlock's stomach, and her shoulders were still shaking with quiet mirth. "I’m really more of a cinema type, when it comes to consumption and engagement with capital A Art. Guess I always had a soft spot for _Pride and Prejudice_, though. And the BBC miniseries--I mean, Colin Firth." She paused. “Forgot for a moment there I was talking to two lesbians, but please, rest assured that having a handsome, well to do gentleman give in and admit you’re right and he’s wrong after months of charged arguments and lingering glances is the heterosexual feminist’s dream.”

"Who knew you had it in you to be a romantic?" Karen teased.

"What, me? I'm made for romance; I'm a capital _R_ Romantic. I'm a Byronic hero, languishing in a modern age that has no appreciation for the finer subtleties of brooding."

"If anyone here is even close to Byronic, it's Warlock," Karen told her dyly, "and she still makes bad puns and drives a lime green Vespa."

"My little weirdo," Pinto cooed, reaching up through the darkness to find Warlock's chin and give it a slow, teasing shake. "I love you guys, you know? Who else would venture out on a dark and stormy night to hunt ghosts with me."

"What are best friends for," Warlock grumbled, only a bit muffled with Pinto's fingers still pressing in on her cheeks. “Besides, it’s hardly stormy anymore.”

The moment grew long and quiet; cottony warm and slow like molasses, and the rain continued to drum on the roof. Warlock breathed in and breathed out, careful not to disturb what was, perhaps, the first proper companionable silence she’d ever been a part of. Was this the mythical sleepover she’d never had as a kid? Her cheeks flushed, pleased, somewhere in the darkness.

"Your question, Pinto," Karen murmured, on a yawn.

Pinto snickered, then released Warlock and cleared her throat a couple of times as she fell into character. "Tell me I'm pretty," she requested, in the tone of voice that implied fluttering eyelashes and a simpering smile; possibly her hands positioned flat and cheeky beneath her chin.

Warlock huffed. "Not a question."

"I refuse to lie," Karen drawled.

"I changed my mind; you're both terrible." Pinto released a sour huff, but she wiggled more firmly up against Warlock’s side. Her hand found one lanky knee and gave it a friendly squeeze. "Have you thought about the fact that we're lying here, in the dark, unseen by the cameras but recording audio.”

“Well observed,” Warlock said. She didn’t need to see Karen to know she was rolling her eyes. "Are you trying to hit on me?"

Pinto barked a laugh. “Shut up. Have you _thought_ about the fact,” she said, with a certain sort of relish, “that we’re lying here, in the dark, unseen by the cameras but recording audio--” a dramatic pause-- “_so_ _we might as well be recording a podcast_?”

There was another long silence. This one was much less companionable.

"_Well_," Karen began, disgruntled, just as Warlock muttered, "Now that you've _said_ it.”

Pinto burst into laughter.

She was practically _crying_, and she rolled on her side to bury her face in Warlock’s t shirt. “We’re idiots!” she hiccupped, slapping the ground next to her, and Karen blew out a breath that somehow turned into its own quiet laughter somewhere at the end.

“We sure are, aren’t we?” she asked.

“Pretty sure I said it first this morning.”

“Shut up, Warlock; no one likes a braggart.”

“You never tell _Pinto_ to shut up, Karen.”

“Well, clearly I like her more than you.”

“Roommate bias,” Warlock huffed. “I’ve been shut out of your dynamic--”

“Yeah, because you’re too filthy rich to have needed a roommate of your own,” Pinto laughed. She sat up, a sudden cold creeping over Warlock’s left side, but she was back after a bit of rustling and grunting, tossing a blanket over all of them and resettling into her spot.

(Warlock was not entirely sure how that worked. She suspected Pinto’s entire body, head included, may have been beneath the blanket.)

The night went on.

It did not all at once become four AM; they talked for hours, off and on and circling back, always, to the game of questions that Warlock had proposed. Somehow, though, the hour seemed to creep up on Warlock, like a thief in the night. The rain had slowed to an almost unheard drizzle, and their voices had quieted with it.

Her eyes drifted closed. There were no two other people, she reflected, that she trusted so much in the entire world. “Whose turn is it?” she asked, half a breath and half a murmur, one strand of Pinto’s curly hair twined around her finger.

“No idea,” Karen mumbled. Her socked feet were pressed flat against Warlock’s warm shin. “I think we’ve just been skipping around, for a while now. Pinto’s, maybe.”

Pinto hummed. She was still using Warlock as a pillow, but her shoulder instead of her stomach now; her back was tucked up against Warlock’s side and her legs curled up in front of herself. “What’s the biggest secret you’re willing to admit?” she finally whispered, her voice clear but soft. It settled over the three of them like an old family quilt, heavy and cool at first touch.

It was four in the morning on a late September night, with a creeping chill threatening the air and a thick blanket of quiet darkness hiding away the stars. It was a time for confessions.

Karen breathed out. “I’m not out, at home,” she said softly. “I don’t think it’d be… bad, if my parents knew, but… things are already weird and awkward enough, since they don’t understand any of the _other_ things about me, and it’d get weirder and more awkward. I’m not ready for that.”

“You don’t have to be,” Warlock murmured. “You never have to be ready, if you don’t want to be.”

“I know.”

“And it’s not your fault, that they’d be weird.”

Karen sighed. “I know that, too.”

“And--”

“Warlock.” Her hand fumbled for Warlock’s in the dark, squeezing once, softly, before retreating. “You don’t have to fix everything.”

She laughed, a little quiet and a little broken and a little hysterical. Of course she didn’t; she was supposed to be the one who broke things, and she was generally good at it. “I don’t know where to start, with mine,” she told the inky blackness above them.

“The beginning?” Pinto suggested, softly.

Warlock closed her eyes. It was just easier that way. “I’ve mentioned Nanny and the gardener,” she said quietly. Twin hums of agreement greeted her from the darkness. “They pretty much raised me, until I was seven. My mom was never really interested in being a mother, and the less we say about my father the better, you know? The thing is.” She paused, licking her lips. “I don’t think… I don’t think they were human. And I know how that sounds, okay?

“You guys barely believe the whole witch thing, and this is… so much more than that.” She gestured with the arm that wasn’t trapped beneath Pinto, not because anyone could see it but just--because. “It’s hard to explain. I was so young, for most of it; I didn’t understand what was strange and what wasn’t until so much later. But there was always something about them that just… felt big and powerful and magical and, and frightening, but not in a way that meant I was in danger. Just that they were something humans weren’t meant to understand, you know?”

She snorted. “You don’t. But that’s what they felt like, and there I was, right in between them. I mean, _in between them_,” she slashed down with the flat of her hand, “like there was this chessboard that they were playing on, and I was right at the center of it. Only I was blindfolded, and they took turns making sure it stayed in place. I could never figure out if they were playing together or against each other. And then--they got bored, I guess. They left.”

Warlock dropped her hand back down to the barn floor with a muted thump. “I stood there for a while, trying to listen for the pieces moving, and by the time I finally got up the guts to reach up and take off the blindfold, the game was already done.”

Karen fumbled for her hand once more, twining their fingers together.

“I know how it sounds,” Warlock repeated. “I don’t think I’m crazy. I'm just--" she broke off. "I don't know."

And didn't she hate to say that? She hated for things to be out of her control. She hated not knowing what to do. She hated feeling like she wasn't--

"When my father died," Pinto said, each quiet, shaky word an olive branch of its own. "Um." She tucked her nose into Warlock's bicep for a moment, a fine tremor running across her shoulders. "Mom took it--hard. You know. She hated what he'd done to her, and especially what he'd done to us, but he--high school sweethearts, you know? She was so angry, and so broken, and Jerry wouldn't be around for a few years yet, and I didn't know what to say to her, and Mitty was just a kid, so he didn't know what to say to _anybody_. Still doesn't," she added, a half-hearted joke.

"How old is he?" Karen asked softly.

"Thirteen, and--" Pinto sighed. "He was six, though, then. I was eleven, and he--he'd missed most of it. Too young to remember; Mom got divorced when he was three. So he was crying, too, all the time, just because Mom was. And I--" she laughed, but not like it was funny. "I didn't cry at _all_. He was my _father_, and I didn't cry for him even _once_."

Her voice twisted, ugly and snarling and unapologetic. "Here's the secret: I don't feel bad about it. I _hated him_," she spit, each word like a breath of dragon's fire. "If there is evil in this world, then he was the _face of it_. He didn't deserve to even _know_ Mom--"

"He didn't deserve to know you, either."

"You certainly didn't deserve…" Karen trailed off. "Having _that_ as your father."

Pinto buried her face in Warlock's arm, letting herself be tugged in tighter. "Sure," she said. It was muffled and tired. Her fire had burnt itself out.

The rain had finally stopped, and there was the slightest hint of grey to the black beyond the windows high up on the walls of the barn. Warlock closed her eyes and rested her cheek on Pinto's head. "Is this what most girls do on sleepovers?" she mumbled.

"What," Karen said quietly, "stay up all night, bare their souls to each other in fraught emotional proclamations, and hunt ghosts?"

"Yeah."

"Pretty much." Pinto yawned and patted her forearm. "Whose turn is it?"

"Doesn't matter to me." Karen's thumb idly brushed across the back of Warlock's hand.

"What time is sunrise?" Warlock asked on her own yawn.

"Couple hours."

"Ugh." Her nose itched, but one arm was trapped under Pinto, and the other hand caught in Karen's. "Can we just throw on a couple floodlights and fake it for the masses? I'm beat."

"Hi, Beat," Pinto said, without missing her own, "I'm Dad."

"I hate you," Karen mumbled. "I genuinely hate you. I wish I was rooming with Marlena down the hall."

Pinto scoffed. "You hate Marlena down the hall."

Warlocked yawned again, their bickering washing over her like white noise. She blinked. Her eyelids felt so heavy. She blinked again, and her eyes didn’t open.

"_You_ hate Marlena down the hall. I find her mildly annoying but polite, and right now, I _hate_ you, so she's the better option."

The voices were still Karen and Pinto, but Warlock’s half-conscious mind summoned images of Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis to go along with them--not a memory, yet it felt real all the way down to her bones. Nanny was perched on the arm of the gardener’s armchair, all teasingly haughty, as he looked up at her with a mischievous sort of amusement.

"You love me."

"I don't even like you."

“What a rude thing to say about the only person in the world willing to put up with fingerpaints on every surface of the kitchen.”

“You say that like there’s more than one tiny piece of countertop in our dorm. And they aren’t _fingerpaints_\--”

“Whatever you say, lady.”

“You’re impossible.”

“I prefer incorrigible.”

Karen’s voice went hushed. “Did Warlock…?”

“Fall asleep? Yeah.”

“Should we…?”

“Ah, let her drool.”

“Bonus content,” Warlock mumbled, and Karen laughed as Pinto startled violently. She opened her eyes to the vague, hazy outline of the barn ceiling above them. “Not asleep.”

“Could have fooled me!”

“Did fool you.”

Pinto let out a massive, beleaguered sigh. “Is everyone against me, today?”

“Always.” Warlock carefully extricated her arm from under Pinto and slipped her hand from Karen’s, sitting up to scrub her hands over her face and drop her forehead to her knees. “I’m going to fall asleep for real though, if I keep lying here.”

“Do some jumping jacks,” Pinto advised, as she propped herself up on her own elbows. “Actually, don’t; I have no idea how sturdy this level is.”

“You could go down to the ground; check the infrareh,” Karen suggested. Her jaw cracked with the force of the yawn that stole her last consonant.

“Yeah.” Warlock reluctantly withdrew her legs from beneath the comforting warmth of the blankets, yelping with the first step onto ice cold wood. “God, the rain really dropped the temperature outside, didn’t it?”

“God bless her,” Pinto agreed, somewhat nonsensically, and squirmed into the overwarm depression Warlock had left behind in the pillows.

Warlock leaned down, fumbling to find her phone among the vague black mass of shoes and bras they’d shed before flopping down in their nest. “Ah.” She flipped on the flashlight, and shuffled over to the ladder.

“Oh, shit,” she said, as the dim light caught vaguely on something down below. “It fucking _worked_.”

“What? Ghost?” The blankets rustled with a vengeance as Pinto scrambled to her feet, rushing over to join Warlock.

“No, look--” She focused her phone on the fluffy white cat sitting patiently at the edge of the chalk circle, tail twitching aimlessly and its eyes glowing up at them in the light of the flashlight. “Take that, Mr. ‘We’re too secluded for a cat to sneak in’.”

Pinto squinted into the darkness, on her hands and knees as she peered over the lip of the barn’s second floor storage space. “I don’t see it.”

“Your night vision sucks,” Warlock said dryly, as Karen joined them, crouching at Warlock’s shoulder.

“Mine is great,” she said, slowly, “but I don’t see it either.”

Warlock scoffed, handing her the phone. “Shine this on the ladder for me.”

She hopped down the last several rungs, gesturing for Karen to toss her the phone (caught with a minimum of fumbling), and glanced over her shoulder, hoping the cat hadn’t been scared off by the sound. It simply sat, still watching her, still twitching its fluffy tail.

“Hey, kitty, kitty,” she said softly as she crept closer, bringing its white fur more clearly into the poor beam of the phone flashlight. “See it now?” she called up.

There was silence, and then hesitantly, “Is this a joke?” Pinto asked, with the general air of someone who wanted to be in on the fun, but was mostly just confused.

“You’re the skeptic, remember?” Karen added, her voice uneasy. “Doesn’t fit the narrative to play pranks like this.”

“What are you talking about?” Warlock demanded, exasperated, and whirled on her heel to glare up at them- both had pulled out their own phones, now- as she pointed defiantly down at the cat. “The damn thing is _right_\--”

_Meow_.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and the cat slowly- deliberately- stood on its haunches, its head tilting curiously; one front paw curled in near to its chest, and the other stretched out to brace itself on _thin air_.

“What,” Warlock choked.

_Meow_, it said, more insistently, and flexed its claws.

It was, she realized, somewhere behind all the buzzing in her brain, right up against the edge of her ghost trap. As if… as if it really couldn’t pass it. As if there was a physical barrier for it to lean that paw against.

Her phone tumbled out of her grip. “You two can’t see it?” Warlock asked, voice tight. The cat’s eyes continued to glow, without the reflection of her flashlight.

“See _what_?” Pinto demanded, sounding impatient. “Warlock, this isn’t--”

She laughed, high pitched and frantic. “Oh, believe me,” she said hysterically, “there’s nothing funny about this to _me_ either,” and she reached out with one foot and scraped a deliberate gap in the chalk edging of the circle.

The cat purred, with the same bizarre echo as it had meowed, and delicately stepped through the circle, one paw after the other and none touching the chalk. It twined around her bare ankles, cool to the touch but undeniably _corporeal_, and Warlock stared down at it.

“Hi,” she said, for a lack of anything better.

_Meow_. It blinked up at her, pausing in its circuit of her legs with one paw on her foot--it didn’t so much have proper _weight_ as much as give off the simple physical sensation of a cat standing on her foot.

“Sure.” She covered her eyes with one hand, more hysterical laughter threatening to bubble up. “We were both right,” she told Pinto. “It’s a fucking _ghost cat_.”

“Oh, _come on_!” Karen shrieked, but Pinto whooped excitedly and launched herself down the ladder.

“Where?” she demanded, attempting to skid to a stop but slamming into Warlock’s side and barely avoiding sending them both tumbling to the hard packed earthen floor. The cat blinked up at them with amusement in its glowing eyes.

“Um.” Warlock leaned down, carefully scooping the cat up and holding its fluffy, feather light mass--er, _non_-mass, within her arms. “Right here.”

Pinto’s eyes skipped across her forearms, a frown wrinkling her brow. “And you’re really not fucking with me?” she asked, doubtfully. She reached out anyway--and Warlock watched her eyes widen as, just for a split second, she touched its silky soft fur.

But her hand was still moving forward, and before she could brush ghostly skin, the cat evaporated to nothing in Warlock’s arms. A wash of cold air flooded over them; they shivered in unison.

Warlock stared down at Pinto, her eyes wide and her arms still positioned as if holding the cat. There was pure silence for one long moment.

“Holy shit!” Pinto yelped, snatching back her hand and spinning on her heels.

“Holy _fucking_ shit!” Warlock tipped her stubborn chin to the ceiling. “IS THIS SOME COSMIC JOKE?” she demanded, cupping her hands around her mouth as she yelled. “IS THIS SOME COSMIC. _FUCKING_. JOKE?”

“Ghosts are real,” Pinto said. “Ghosts are fucking--”

“IT’S NOT A REAL FUCKING GHOST TRAP! I MADE IT UP! I DREW SIXTY-NINE OF THOSE FAKE SIGILS!”

“Oh god, we have to rebrand the entire--wait, seriously?” Pinto grabbed her wrists, dragging her hands down from her mouth and stealing her wild eyed attention away from whatever ethereal prankster she’d been yelling at.

“Yeah,” Warlock said, her chest heaving for breath. “Yeah, I thought--I thought it was funny. Y’know. Sixty-nine." She gestured vaguely. "Nice.”

“Nice.”

“Thanks.” She dropped her forehead to the top of Pinto’s head, and for once she wasn’t even annoyed by the hair that immediately decided to make its way into her mouth. "What the _fuck_, Pinto? Ghosts? Ghost _cats_?"

Pinto blinked, her brow furrowing as she mused, "Raises some interesting philosophical questions, doesn't it?"

Warlock blew out a breath, rocking back on her heels as she considered this. "Yeah. Ghost cat says, 'fuck the mind-body problem.'"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Transphobia-- Warlock's narration references it in the first paragraph immediately after the second line break
> 
> Child Abuse-- Super, SUPER vague allusions to Pinto's dad not being a nice guy between “Isn’t it supposed to be your father’s forehead?” and “My stepfather is the shit, though." in the first scene. Less vague allusions (though again, nothing stated outright) in the question game scene near the end of the chapter; after Warlock's revelation about Nanny and the gardener and the internal thought "She hated feeling like--", skip to "Pinto buried her face in Warlock's arm." Warlock also spends a good portion of the third scene (it starts with them about to play soccer) referencing her discomfort with maternal and masculine authority figures because her parents suck, but it's a bit too diluted to easily instruct on how to avoid it (but it's not really anything worse than what was alluded to in chapter one, so if you've made it here you'll probably be okay).
> 
> Bar creep-- After the answering machine picks up the call in the first scene, skip at least to "And then she hung up." to avoid the discussion of the guy, and all the way to the next scene to avoid the sequence entirely.


	3. Armageddon is No Excuse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What," Warlock said, "are you saying that just because I'm a witch I could Google Translate some Latin and summon a demon if I felt like it?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few comments--
> 
> 1) I feel like I should probably mention that this Warlock is most definitely the one from the book, not the show--I pictured her as a blonde, right off the bat, and that stuck around through what little canon-based characterization she got (like the reference to her being good at maths). As someone who's owned exactly one gaming system in their life (a Wii), I didn't feel qualified to write the Warlock "Nintendo DS" Dowling of the show.
> 
> 2) I know absolutely nothing about art, so if you do and all of the commentary from the art show makes no sense... I'm sorry!
> 
> 3) Warlock says some not strictly accurate things about ouija boards in this chapter--but I have my reasons! She seems like the sort who would wonder why nothing spooky was going on, read the first paragraph on wikipedia, and then toss it somewhere to never be seen again in a fit of pique. (Ouija boards in particular ARE a Hasbro parlor game invention, but talking boards as a concept have existed in a variety of forms and with various occult sensibilities for much longer. She should have read the first THREE paragraphs of the wiki page, like I did.)

_"Now_," the Pinto on the tv screen says, her hands folded primly in front of her atop the desk in her mother's study, as she addresses the camera directly, "_I know what you're thinking. 'All they have is audio! What kind of proof is that? It's so easily staged!'_"

"Would that it were," Warlock said dryly. "I prefer my world's view un-rocked, thank you very much."

The Pinto sitting next to her on her own couch smacked her shoulder with the back of one hand, shushing her.

"Ow!"

"_What you're forgetting, dear listener--_"

"We're not a podcast, Pinto!"

"Shut _up_, Warlock!"

"Sure, take _her_ side, Karen--"

"_\--much as we ourselves forgot for the better part of the next day, as we were very tired and highly distressed by our experiences, was that we _were_ recording a video feed…_"

TV-Pinto's voice fell silent as the scene faded from Pinto’s mom’s office to an infrared image of the barn. There was very little to see; the timestamp read as slightly before two in the morning.

A darker smudge of cool air- just barely visible against the chill of the rainy September night- crept out of the metaphorical shadows and circled about the floor before settling in one place. It wisped at the edges and seemed almost to flicker.

"_Well_," the Pinto-voice over said, sounding satisfied, "_what do you think of that_?"

Karen squinted doubtfully at the television with a tug at the corner of her lips that said she was resisting the urge to make a disparaging comment. Warlock suspected she was loathe to burst Pinto's bubble, but it just wasn't particularly damning evidence, when it came down to it. The color change was a bit hard to see--almost impossible, if your screen wasn't tilted just right.

The time stamp skipped ahead to almost five AM. The cool spot was still there, and the audio- an abridged version of which having played earlier over a black screen- crackled to life.

"_Oh, shit_," Warlock's own voice- deeper than she hears it in her head, summoning a grimace- said. "_It fucking_ worked."

"_What? Ghost?_"

"_No, look--take that, Mr. 'We're too secluded for a cat to sneak in_'."

"_I don’t see it_.”

“_Your night vision sucks_.”

“_Mine is great, but I don’t see it either_.”

“_Shine this on the ladder for me_.”

There was a pause, and the twin thuds of feet on the ground and a phone being caught out of the air.

“_Hey, kitty, kitty_,” and the red and orange blob of heat constituting Warlock Dowling crept into frame, one arm extended with a vaguely yellow phone-shaped blob in hand. “_See it now_?”

Another pause.

“_Is this a joke_?”

“_You’re the skeptic, remember? Doesn’t fit the narrative to play pranks like this_.”

“_What are you talking about? The damn thing is _right--”

The barely-there blue blob shifted, for the first time in hours, lengthening upward and shifting slightly forward.

“_What_."

The yellow phone-rectangle dropped to the ground.

“_You two can’t see it_?”

“_See _what_? Warlock, this isn’t_\--”

High pitched, frantic laughter. “_Oh, believe me, there’s nothing funny about this to _me_ either_."

And Warlock stuck one foot out and dragged it over the ground. It was hard to see what happened next--her movement had placed her between the camera and the chilled spot, but there was a flicker of fluctuating temperature around her feet as Warlock's infrared silhouette stared down at them.

“_Hi_,” she said, and it was barely picked up by the microphone, well up above, but the more hysterical, “_Sure. We were both right. It’s a fucking_ ghost cat," came through just fine.

“_Oh, come on_!”

A clatter of noise rang from the ladder. “_Where_?” Pinto demanded as her heat signature skidded into view.

“_Um_.” Warlock leaned down, and the vague blue spot seemed to disappear from around her feet. Her body blocked her arms- and whatever may have been in them- from view. “_Right here_.”

“_And you’re really not fucking with me_?”

Pinto reached out--

A moment later, both of their temperatures briefly dropped a degree or two.

“_Holy shit_!”

“_Holy_ fucking _shit_! _IS THIS SOME COSMIC JOKE? IS THIS SOME COSMIC._ FUCKING. _JOKE_?”

The screen switched back to Pinto at her mother's desk. She appeared downright smug. "_I rest my case_," she said, as it faded into a shot of Warlock and herself that they'd returned to not-Willie Lumpkin's grave to record just before they left.

"_My name is Pinto Bernard, and this has been 'We've got a Witch.' I'm not a witch, but I'm_ not_ a skeptic, either. I do believe in ghosts_."

"_My name is Warlock Dowling, and up until last night, I used to think ghosts were- to borrow a turn of phrase from a dear friend- 'a crock of shit'_."

"_She's the witch_."

"_She's the dear friend_."

"_And we're here to help_."

Fade to black.

Pinto hit pause on her laptop before it could skip back to the main screen of her editing software. "Well?" she demanded, shoving at the glasses on her nose. "What do you think of our debut?"

"No one's going to believe us." Warlock flopped back into the couch, reaching over to half-heartedly rustle Pinto's hair. "But it looks great."

"It's… almost convincing," Karen said, politely, proving Warlock's point. She hadn't felt silky soft fur disappear beneath her fingertips--she was still just humoring them.

"Thank you." Pinto blew them each a kiss, breezing past the cynical bits of their commentary with all the ease of a woman who had a mildly obnoxious younger sibling. When she didn't want to hear it, she might as well not have heard it. "But we need better mics before next time," she added. "The ones we were using weren't _terrible_, but--"

"What we need are _clients_," Karen pointed out, ever pragmatic. "No point in buying new equipment if we won't be making more videos."

"Oh, ye of little faith," Pinto said derisively. "I posted our website and a teaser clip on a few forums last weekend--_clients_, we've got." She pulled the laptop into her lap, saving and closing out of the program and flipping over to an Excel spreadsheet full of names, addresses, phone numbers, and brief descriptions of their troubles. With a flourish, she handed it over to Karen.

"You're kidding," Karen said, her nose scrunching up as she leaned in to peer at the list.

"What can I say?" Pinto threw her arms wide, chin tipped dramatically to the ceiling. "People get bored."

Karen scoffed and grumbled and tucked a wayward strand of mouse brown hair behind her ear, but Warlock barely even glanced at the spreadsheet. "We also need information," she muttered, picking at the skin at the edges of her nails with a deepening frown.

_Ghosts_. Perhaps she should never have found the idea so absurd, considering she was fairly certain she'd personally been raised by members of the Fair Folk until she was seven, but that was somewhat beside the point. She'd thought spirits weren't real so she knew next to nothing about them, and _absolutely_ nothing about why her "ghost trap" had worked.

She stood abruptly, stalking over to the frog tank and crouching in front of it, settling her chin on crossed forearms as she stared in at them. "I'm going to have to become an _actual_ expert on the paranormal," she said sourly. How did you even do that? Watch reruns of that show with the angsty brothers that her mum loved?

One of the frogs was perched on the glass of the tank. She could count its toes and watch the rise and fall of its breaths, and it was utterly ignoring her. Warlock appreciated that.

"An 'actual expert' on the 'paranormal'," Karen repeated, with a thin thread of sarcasm in her tone. "These people _hardly_ need real help. Look, this one thinks her late aunt's ghost is stealing her socks out of the dryer."

Pinto hummed thoughtfully, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of whatever Warlock was up to. "We should buy a ouija board," she said, apropos of little and with a certain sort of relish.

Warlock pulled a face and shoved herself to her feet. She tweaked the angle of the frogs' sun lamp, feeling jittery and restless, and stomped- rather less successfully in her socked feet than if she'd been in her combat boots- back towards her bedroom.

"What would be weirder--if I had one even though I didn't believe in ghosts, or if I didn't have one even though I'm a witch?" she asked, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard from the other room, and dropped to her stomach to peer beneath the bed.

"Definitely the former," Karen called after her, sounding vaguely distracted.

"Oh." Warlock grimaced. "Guess I have some explaining to do, then."

Pinto's eyes grew wide as Warlock dropped the board, carelessly, into her lap before flinging herself down on the floor. The chill of the concrete seeped up, even through her plush area rug, and Warlock flung her limbs in every which direction and let herself sink into it.

"The bloody fuck you have this for?" Pinto demanded, tipping the board up to the light as she inspected it.

"It was invented as a parlor game in 1890," Warlock said on a yawn. "It's trademarked by _Hasbro_. It's hardly occult."

And yet, it had such a strong stigma as to have been highly disapproved of by her mother--Warlock had been thirteen and on the cusp of several great awakenings and still that touch too spoiled, and she'd bought one with her allowance money just to see the look on her mother's face when she walked in and saw Warlock "communing with spirits" in the middle of the den. The grounding had certainly been worth it, especially since her mum forgot about the whole thing as soon as she got wrapped up in her next project for work.

"And you made that ghost trap up out of thin air, but _it _still worked," Karen pointed out, nose still buried in their client list.

Warlock felt a grin stretch unbidden across her face; its gleeful twin was curling over Pinto’s as she snickered, "Oh?"

Karen glanced up just to shoot them both dirty looks. "What?" she demanded waspishly.

"Admitting my ghost trap caught an actual ghost, are we?" Warlock asked, her voice velvety smooth and downright _predatory_ as Pinto cackled.

The noise Karen made was an unintelligible sort of splutter that nonetheless managed to convey deep insult and denial to Warlock's practiced ear. "Shut up," she then snapped, the tips of her ears very red. "I'm just saying, _if_ you believe in your silly chalk drawings, then you can't deny the potential of a ouija board!"

"Maybe it's all about the intent," Pinto cut in loudly, before Warlock could tease Karen further. She began slowly, but seemed to be warming quickly to the topic, her brown eyes glittering with excitement. "Maybe you didn't expect the trap to work on a ghost, but you _did _expect it to work on a _cat_. So--so that's still what happened, right?" she shoved her hair back behind her ear, gears visibly spinning behind her eyes. "Just differently than you'd thought. Maybe you need the power, too, though, and that's why these things don't work for every Average Jane who walks in off the street and tries a summoning ritual with her girlfriends on a Friday night--"

"What," Warlock said, "are you saying that just because I'm a witch I could Google Translate some Latin and summon a demon if I felt like it?"

** _CRASH._ **

Pinto yelped, flinching violently, and Karen jerked upright, eyes wide. "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?" she yelled, even as the sudden barrage of noise from upstairs quieted just enough to manage to sort itself out into strains of vintage rock.

"REMEMBER ME TELLING YOU ABOUT MY SHITTY NEIGHBOR?" Warlock shouted back.

She begrudgingly lifted her arm off of the floor, peering in disgust at her wristwatch. This was, she noted furiously, absolutely ridiculous. It was nearly one in the morning, and on a _Thursday_. They had classes in the morning! Most of the building had jobs to get to! So what if she and her friends were all planning to stay up for several more hours and play hooky the next day? It was the _principle_ of the thing.

"Excuse me," she snarled, though they probably couldn't hear her above the racket, and folded her limbs back up beneath herself to launch to her feet and stalk towards the front door. She remembered to shove her feet into her boots along the way, just to make all the stomping more satisfying.

She wasn't the only one to emerge from her apartment--several people on the next floor up were sticking their heads out, looking disgusted. She was, however, the only one who seemed to be planning to do anything about it.

"EXCUSE ME!" Warlock repeated- screeched, really- and pounded firmly on the door of the apartment directly above her own. After an impatient moment, she pounded once more, using both fists and also the righteous fury of teenagers everywhere.

"_Can't stop me now_!" Freddie Mercury taunted from the other side of the door.

"Bugger this," she snapped, and dropped neatly to one knee, shoving her hand down her shirt to nab her lockpicks from their eternal position shoved in the band of her bra. "It's for the greater good," she assured the watching neighbors, and one particularly harried woman with a screaming baby on her hip gestured her on with her free hand.

The lock clicked open in seconds.

Warlock rose to her feet, squaring her shoulders and slipping the lockpicks into her pocket, and swung the door open. "EXCUSE ME," she shouted again, "BUT YOUR DOOR WAS UNLOCKED AND WHILE I'VE NEVER AGREED WITH THE TERM 'DEVIL'S MUSIC' BEFORE TONIGHT, I'M RATHER PREPARED TO SIDE WITH THE CHURCH RIGHT AT THE MOMENT, HM?"

She'd considered what this neighbor must look like a few times over the last several months, but the reality, as ever, was much more mundane than her furious and uncharitable imaginings.

They were tall and knobbly with shoulder length red hair, a black suit that may have been fashionable if they were about ten years younger, and dark sunglasses. They squawked with indignation- or Warlock assumed, anyway, though she couldn’t hear them above the music- from where they were draped over their hideous couch as she stomped her way inside, zeroing in on the speaker system with laser-like intensity.

She spun the knob one way, and nothing happened. She spun it the other--still nothing.

"HOW THE FUCK DO I--"

And with a wave of their- his?- hand, the neighbor shut it off. He must have one of those smart house systems, programmed to respond to certain gestures. "Who the fuck are you?" he demanded, nose scrunching as he took in her wild eyes and messy plait and the untied combat boots at the bottom of sweatpants and a red flannel shirt.

"I'm the fuck your downstairs neighbor," she snapped. "It's one in the morning!"

"I know the time, you angry little lumberjack! How did you _get in_?!" He sat up enough to throw his front door a downright _venomous _look of betrayal.

"I already told you; it was unlocked," she snarled.

"That doesn't explain how you _got in_," he snarled back, rather nonsensically, and Warlock fired off her best sneer, the one she'd learned from Nanny before the age of five.

"Just keep the music down, you abominable wank--"

Some tiny, hind brain instinct _finally_ managed to scream its way to the surface of her thoughts from where her anger had been shoving it down deep, and Warlock felt her breath leave her all at once as true, spine tingling _terror_ took root.

The apartment, she noted distantly, was much, much larger than it should have been, and magic _dripped_ from its every surface. It was magic that was very old, and very powerful, and at the moment, _very pissed_ and _very much unfolding itself off of its couch into six spindly feet of eldritch being_.

Warlock took several hasty, backwards steps. "Just keep the music down," she repeated, voice suddenly an octave higher than it had been before, and quickly tacked on, "Please," before marching herself back out the door- and shutting it firmly- in what could only be described as a tactical retreat.

The other neighbors were applauding. She didn't even hear them.

"The prodigal daughter returns!" Pinto crowed, hands raised in victory, and Warlock slammed the front door shut behind herself with a wild eyed expression on her face.

"Um," said Karen.

"Something happen?" Pinto asked, uncertain, as her arms drooped slowly.

"Erm," Warlock said. The doorknob was digging into her back, and she had a sudden, terrifying vision of a zealous Pinto insisting on investigating her upstairs neighbor for Youtube's gratification. "No," she said, unconvincingly, as her chest heaved and she fought for breath. "Uh. I just, y'know. Picked the lock and snuck in to turn the music off without--" it-- "him noticing." She forced herself to step away from the door.

"Oh, good," Karen said sarcastically, as this was the first she'd heard of this particular skillset of Warlock's. "I've always wanted to consort with criminals."

"Women want me, priests and policemen fear me," Warlock answered distractedly. If it was all about intent, she wondered, would a line of salt actually help? Would it be possible to lay one down without Pinto noticing? Maybe she could just convince herself that her neighbor was terrified of amphibians and/or tarantulas. "Let's, um." She shook her head, trying to clear away the cobwebs. "Let's talk _research_."

Pinto and Karen exchanged a look.

"Let's please talk research," Warlock said, loudly, and Pinto fixed her with a sour glare that said, "I'm going to want answers _eventually_, jackass." Warlock responded with a despairing nose wrinkle that begged, "That's fair, just _please _change the subject until I figure out how to process this."

Pinto relented. "I think," she said, making a valiant effort at her usual distracting cheer, "we may need to go analog for this one." Her smile turned sly. "It'll make a better video than all of us staring at a computer screen for four hours, you know?"

"Oh god," Warlock said.

"Bonus content," Karen sighed.

* * *

It was a rare day of English sunshine.

(And, since it was also mid-October, it wasn't even the kind of sunshine that made Warlock want to break out an umbrella and some sunscreen.)

She stretched her long legs out in front of herself, slouching back on the heel of one hand and skimming through her phone with the other. Pinto wouldn't be out of class for nearly an hour, but they were going to an art show to support Karen that afternoon, so Warlock figured she would wait.

(Usually they got out at the same time, but today Warlock had only needed to show up to turn in a draft of a paper on the sophists. As a group, they had been notorious wordsmiths and devil's advocates, infamous for their dedication to an unbeatable argument over the pursuit of philosophical truth. They were, generally, disliked. Warlock, personally, abhorred their philosophical stance but sympathized with the need to win every argument you had ever engaged in.)

There was nothing on the news but the typical doom and gloom cut with worthless puff pieces. Warlock sighed, slipping her phone back into the pocket of her baggy jeans, then- with only a moment's hesitation- let herself flop flat onto the ground.

She was rather practiced in the art of being alone with her thoughts for extended periods of time (she was, after all, both an only child and a philosophy major), and usually found that there was something refreshing about sinking down into the grass for a good _think_. Not to mention that there was quite a bit to think _about_, after the last few weeks, and that she hadn't had much opportunity to truly process most of it.

The grass was cool and fragrant and prickled at the back of her neck, and Warlock draped her forearm over her eyes to block the sun's attempts to creep down to her through the speckled shadows of the leaves above.

Should she start with the ghosts? With the nature and intentions of the creature who lived in the flat above hers? With her own ongoing discomfort with authority figures and accepting the affection of a best friend? With… _whatever_ it was that was going on between herself and Karen?

Cheeks dusted with pink, Warlock dropped her arm back to her side, digging her fingers into the grass and blinking furiously against the scattered rays of sunlight.

_Dishonesty_, she chided herself, _is no place to start a session of introspection_. She knew _exactly_ what was going on, or at the very least she knew exactly what she _wanted_ to be--

_BRRING. BRRING._

Warlock scowled. It was quite hard to concentrate with someone ignoring a phone call in her immediate vicinity. Who on earth even had their phone turned off of vibrate in this day and--

_BRRING. BRRING._

She sat upright and whipped around, prepared to give the kind of scathing look that made frat boys and pretentious hipsters alike quake in their boots, and discovered that there was no one nearby.

_BRRING. BRRING._

With a start, she realized the ringing came from her own pocket--there was a vague memory attached to the realization, as she fumbled to retrieve it. She thought perhaps Pinto had requested she turn the volume on the last time they'd ordered takeaway, in case the delivery boy got lost, as delivery boys were sometimes wont to do.

_BRRI_\--

"Harriet," she said, coolly.

"_Would it kill you_," a tired voice sighed from the other end of the line, "_to call me 'Mom'? It's not like I'm a stepmother or anything like that--you came out of me_!"

Warlock shrugged, adjusting her position to be able to properly lean up against the tree as she muttered, "Might do."

"_Warlock_."

"Sorry, ma'am," she drawled.

"_There's no need to get nasty. Honestly, you'd think you were raised in a barn._"

"Spent the night in one the other day," she said, just to hear the scoff of indignation.

"_Why on earth_\--"

"Ghost hunting." She said it with relish.

"_The Lord_," Harriet Dowling said, with the kind of sarcastic exasperation that her daughter would never admit to having inherited genetically, "_is really testing me with you_."

"And my phone plan is really testing me with you. I hope you're intending to pay for this international phone call." After a beat, with a begrudging sort of contrition, Warlock added, "Mom."

Harriet huffed. She sounded torn between fondness and annoyance as she pointed out, "_Darling, I pay for all of your phone calls._"

"I could get a job," Warlock threatened.

"_Ugh, how pedestrian_," said the woman who had had three separate jobs to support her own college career, with just a hint of humor in her voice. Warlock thought, sometimes, that if she'd known Harriet Dowling before she'd ever been a Dowling, then they may have been able to be friends. But that was ridiculous, of course--Harriet Johnson was the woman who'd fallen in love with Thaddeus Dowling, and Warlock could never be fond of a woman like that.

"_Focus on your studies_," she was saying. "_How are they, darling? Is it everything you'd hoped, being back in England_?"

(The quiet accusation, that Warlock had promised to call on a regular basis in exchange for being allowed to go overseas, and that she had then proceeded to not do so, went unsaid. Warlock heard it anyway.)

There were plenty of things she could say--that she was thriving academically, despite pouring much more time and effort into those occult endeavors Harriet so disapproved of. That there was something about this country, this place where she had been born, that had always felt so much more a part of her than Chicago ever had, seven generations of Illinoisan Dowlings be damned.

"I made friends," was what came out of her mouth instead, earnest and quiet, and her mother sucked in a breath.

"_Yeah_?" she said tentatively.

"And I yelled at my upstairs neighbor and started a feud with my downstairs neighbor," she added quickly, lest she accidentally foster any sort of maternal pride in her social skills.

"_Of course you did_."

"Right." Warlock fidgeted, awkwardly, and looked up to the canopy of her shade tree as if it might have answers written for her on the undersides of its leaves. There was a medieval herbalist theory about that, she was pretty sure. She'd heard about it on a podcast.

"_I was thinking about coming to visit you for Thanksgiving_," Harriet said, in the same tone of voice as she might tell the chauffeur, "I was thinking of driving myself today, actually." A command, not an invitation for commentary.

(It didn't occur to Warlock that this form of confidence may have been as fake as her own so often was; that Harriet Dowling may have been a woman who'd been staring down the barrel of a decade of mistakes for some time now, and hadn't the slightest idea of how to bridge the gap between herself and the daughter she desperately wished she knew.)

(A lot of things never occurred to Warlock, including whether or not her mother's modest Chicago apartment and her father's extended stay in the Middle East may have been a method of divorce that allowed him to save face in front of his colleagues. Such was the thing about being a teenager, even when one was also a witch--a supernatural predisposition towards attention to detail was still not always enough to help you understand your parents, especially when you were generally of a mind to hold a grudge.)

"I don't have it off," Warlock warned rather desperately. "It's not a holiday here."

"_All the more reason for me to come help you celebrate_," Harriet said brightly. "_You can have your friends round; I'd love to meet them_."

"They'll love to meet you, too," she said, with a bitter sort of resignation. She was a touch too self-aware to actually believe Karen and Pinto would side with her mother over her, even if that part of herself that liked to wallow dramatically in self-pity said they would, but it was the rote response for this dance that Harriet always liked to lead.

"_Then it's a date_," she said, sounding pleased. "_I'll text you the details when I've bought my plane tickets_."

"I'll pick you up on the Vespa."

"_Testing me_."

"I'll order you an Uber."

"_Testing me_!"

Warlock didn't laugh; she didn't have that kind of relationship with her mother. "I'll move the millipedes out of the living room so you don't have to look at them," she offered, a single point of concession, and Harriet audibly softened.

"_Thank you, darling_," she said. "_I should… I should go. I'll see you in November._"

"Yeah, okay."

"_Goodbye, sweetheart. Be safe._"

"You, too."

"_I love you_," Harriet said quickly, and then she hung up.

Warlock pulled the phone slowly away from her ear, staring down at the white screen with its little circular picture of her mother. It was the one she'd pulled off of the website for the PR firm Harriet worked at; she wasn't at all sure she had anything more candid anywhere on her phone or floating in the cloud.

CALL ENDED, it said below.

"What's with the face?" Pinto asked, when she trotted up fifteen minutes later. "Gum?" she added, flicking the little packet open like it was a carton of cigarettes.

"My mother told me she loved me, so I'm trying to figure out how best to determine if the apocalypse is imminent," Warlock told her sardonically, and accepted the stick of gum. It was cinnamon, today.

Pinto's own face did something complicated. "Well," she said finally, "Armageddon is no excuse for being late to Karen's show, so let's boogie back to yours for our fancy duds, hm?"

Warlock rose slowly, brushing off the seat of her pants. "I've it on good authority that I've never boogied in my life."

"Oh, who's authority, huh? Don't make me carry you."

"Jesus, not _again_\--oi!"

"The fuck are you so tall," Pinto grunted, attempting to drop her shoulder to gain enough leverage to lift Warlock in a simulacrum of a fireman’s carry.

"As in 'why' or 'how'?" Warlock let herself slump forward, snickering as Pinto squeaked and found herself being born, inevitably, towards the ground under Warlock's body weight and the terrible angle. "Because the latter's just genetics, but the former's an interesting investigation into the nature of reality and predestination versus random causality."

"This is why everyone hates philosophy majors," Pinto complained, scrabbling to get her feet back under herself enough that she could tip Warlock unceremoniously to the ground. She stood above her for a moment, frowning- as Warlock grumbled- before wiping her hands of the whole affair and striding off. "Hurry _up_, you jolly green giant."

"You started it, pipsqueak." Warlock caught up with a few strides, and smiled smugly as Pinto playfully glowered.

With the shake of a fist, she declared, "When the revolution comes--"

"We'll both be long dead from nuclear annihilation," Warlock said dryly.

Pinto huffed. "But we shan't live even that long if we miss Karen's show."

"Karen's far too polite for murder."

"And that's the difference between being friends and being roommates, I should think," Pinto told her. It should have sounded like a joke--it didn't.

Warlock harrumphed- the technique of a good, hearty harrumph is best known only to teenagers and octogenarians- and shoved her hands in her pockets with a sour purse to her lips. "Are you really changing?" she asked, disgruntled. "I was just going to throw on a blazer over the flannel. It's a _college art show_, half the people there will be in jeggings."

"That was snobbish," Pinto said, with genuine surprise. "My, the love of your mother really _has_ put you in a foul mood. Should I make a picket sign for you, so all the lonesome artsy lesbians who are bound to be at this thing won't even bother?" She made a gesture as if holding said sign and thrusting it rhythmically into the air, her eyebrows shooting high up her forehead.

Warlock glowered. "There's no need to be _nasty_."

She realized, a moment later, that she was parroting her mother, and made a vague and somewhat painful choking noise, deep in her throat. This caused her to almost choke, for real, on the gum Pinto had given her.

"If we don't dress nice," Pinto said, switching tacks out of an emotion somewhere between sympathy and annoyance, as she banged on what she could reach of Warlock's back, "the waiters won't mistake us for important people and offer us those little tarts Karen's been going on about."

"Oh. Hrngh." Warlock brushed away her hands and swiped at the stubborn tears which had been summoned by her brush with death. "Fair point," she said begrudgingly, and threw away the gum in a nearby trash bin.

"Obviously," Pinto scoffed. "It's _my_ point."

"Of course, they're not going to mistake us for anyone important, regardless," Warlock pointed out, but she let Pinto slide her arm through hers and drag her down the shortcut back to the Mayfair flat.

(In the interest of full disclosure, said shortcut wasn't so much a _shortcut_ as a slightly longer route that went past a cafe with outside seating that was a popular spot for upperclassmen to bring their dogs. Pinto claimed it was a shortcut, in order to justify the detour, and Warlock politely allowed her to get away with this fiction, much the way Karen politely allowed Warlock and Pinto to both continue to believe the absolute lie that was “Warlock Dowling is not a snob”.)

"Oh, ye of little faith," Pinto said. It was meant to be dry and disapproving, but came out in a squeal as she dropped to her knees next to a friendly, slobbery great dane that they'd run into a few times now.

Warlock nodded to the owner- a young woman who seemed more amused by the pair of them every time they met her- and shoved her hands in her pockets, keeping a polite distance. Her personal tastes in pets ran exclusively to the non-furry, and preferably to the multi-legged and/or multi-eyed. Dogs and cats were _fine_, she supposed, as long as you didn't mind them crawling in your bed or scratching at your furniture, and birds were unbearably loud and fussy.

Her father had presented her with a basset hound when she was twelve years old, and even then she'd taken one look at the beast and politely said, "No, thank you, not for me. There's a hermit crab in the pet shop I've my eye on, if it's all the same to you, mate."

(In retrospect, the treaty of misapprehension between herself and Thaddeus Dowling had begun well before a fifteen-year-old Warlock traded in the watch she'd received on her thirteenth birthday to finance a misguided foray into the world of makeup.)

Pinto was laughing, letting the mutt bowl her over and swipe that humongous tongue across her face despite the owner's half-hearted recriminations, and Warlock sighed, stepping close enough to nudge her best friend with one foot. A great speck of slobber landed on her converse in the process.

"The show?" she prompted. "Fancy duds? Gotta--" Warlock's tone conveyed sarcastic air quotes though her hands remained in her pockets-- "'boogie'?"

Marmaduke's owner laughed. "C'mere, you massive, massive ham," she said, with a level of familiarity which Warlock would _never_ insult Trudy the tarantula by addressing her with, and tightened her grip on the leash to pull the dog off of Pinto. "I know," she cooed, leaning down to slop a kiss on its forehead. "You miss your buddy already--"

Her words turned to static in Warlock’s ears. It was that moment of not-premonition--the sudden blaring awareness of a thousand tiny details that turned the future into a puzzle with a single piece missing.

They all saw the kid slipping past them towards the cafe. Pinto's eyes flicked to him and then away, her attention still focused on the great dane, and the owner scooted her chair in just slightly in that universal nonverbal signal of "Sorry, feel free to get around me".

They all saw the kid, but Warlock was the only one who was watching him.

She stepped calmly up behind him, her own hand snapping out to catch his wrist before it could withdraw from dog lady's purse. "Need or compulsion?" she asked sharply, even as Lassie's human form gasped and grabbed her things, scrambling to the other side of the table.

The kid twisted in her grip, his eyes skittering around, looking for an escape route. "Let go of me--!"

"Hey," Warlock snapped, crouching down to his eye level and pointing from his eyes to her own. "I'm a witch," she said, a tiny crackle of power running over her skin and across to his--it was the most she was capable of wielding like this, really; just barely enough to give you goosebumps, but she watched his eyes get wide. He suddenly stopped struggling, though he leaned far away from her. "Believe me?" she asked firmly.

He nodded very quickly, several times.

"Good." She breathed out, relaxing her grip _slightly_, but not enough to encourage him in the idea that he could get away if he wanted to. "Do you need the money, or do you just get a kick from stealing?"

His tiny lower lip trembled, and he jutted his chin forward stubbornly. He began hotly, "It's none of your--"

"Try again."

His eyes dropped to the ground, and his little feet shuffled in place. "My sister," he muttered, and Warlock breathed out sharply through her nose.

"Need," she said grimly, and released him to pull out her wallet. He started to back away--then when he noticed the bills she withdrew, his feet stilled and his eyes grew big again, his jaw going slack. She held the stack up between two fingers, but flicked it away before he could grab them. "Ah, ah. Witches always have conditions, kid; haven't you ever read a fairytale before?"

He glowered. "Fairytales are for girls."

"And desperate little boys who want a lot of money," Warlock snapped. "Next time you need something to help your family out, you open a lemonade stand, capische?"

He nodded vigorously once more. "Uh huh."

"And if you try to pick someone's pocket again, I'm gonna know, and I'm gonna hex your fingers off. Got it?"

His face went very white. "Uh huh."

"Take the money."

He did, dashing off practically before it had left Warlock's hand, and she sighed and pushed herself back onto her feet. The female, British versions of Shaggy and Scooby were staring at her slack jawed. (Or, well, Shaggy was, her hands still clutched tightly around the leash and her purse. The great dane was just resting its chin on her knee and aggressively attempting to start a flood with all of its slobber.)

"I-- You--" she said.

Warlock looked at her watch. "We're gonna be late for real," she told Pinto.

"It's an art show," Pinto pointed out philosophically, sliding her arm through Warlock's and guiding her off. "It's not like a movie or something where missing the first ten minutes is going to ruin the whole thing."

Shaggy finally found her voice. "Thank you!" she yelled, still just a little breathless with adrenaline, and Warlock shot off a languid two-fingered salute without looking back.

Pinto huffed a laugh. She did glance over her shoulder, a smug glint in her eye as she gave a friendly wiggle of her fingers. "Turning children off of a life of crime," she observed idly, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

In fact, her tone was _so_ casual that it instantly made Warlock suspicious. "Right," she said, shooting a narrow eyed glare down and slightly to the left.

Pinto snapped her fingers, her smile refusing to dim. "Hey, wait a minute!" She prodded Warlock in the bicep, her eyebrows shooting high. "Didn't you just break into your neighbor's apartment like, less than a week ago?"

"Hypocrisy," Warlock said stiffly, "is a bedrock of modern society."

* * *

Most of the show pieces were small and (in Warlock's amateur opinion) fairly contrived in their attempts at sophistication, but Karen's was of a borderline remarkable scale, comparatively; the canvas stood nearly as tall as Warlock and half again as wide. Reds and oranges and blues and thin splashes of yellow consumed it, the paint applied and reapplied and reapplied over and over to form thick peaks and valleys and jagged crags of color.

"Be careful," Karen advised, with the carefully modulated tone of someone who desperately wanted to freak out and tell you to back the hell up, but was trying to be polite about it. "It's going to take months for it to dry completely."

"Not going to touch it, promise," Warlock told her, shooting an amused smile over her shoulder. Karen's hands were clenched on Pinto's shoulders, and her smile was strained; out of concern for her blood pressure, Warlock politely shuffled back half a step. "Just trying to get every angle," she added. There was something _familiar_ about the painting, she was certain. If she could just put her finger on it.

"It's stunning," Pinto declared, reaching up to squeeze Karen's hand. "What, er." She cleared her throat.

"Is it?" Karen asked dryly.

"I _told_ you I'm terrible at this stuff."

Karen laughed, tucking a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail back behind the freckled curve of her ear, and something clicked.

"It's a cat," Warlock said suddenly, gesturing to the blue flick of an ear and the sweep of a tail, both disguised and depicted by the layers upon layers of paint. She narrowed her eyes at the color palette, and turned on her heel to declare accusingly, "It's _the _cat."

"It's _you_," Karen threw back, chin tipped up slightly in defiance; one finger traced a curl of yellow and then tugged pointedly at the end of Warlock's braided hair where it draped over her shoulder. "Holding your supposed ghost cat. An artist's rendition, obviously, since nothing could _really_ be seen on the infrared. It was the only thing I could think about for a week, for I think _obvious_ reasons."

She pointed out a red-orange arc at the edge of the canvas, adding quickly, "And Pinto's impending touch, of course," as if to deny the spots of color high in her cheeks.

"Of course," Warlock said, somewhat weakly. She went to shove her hand in her pockets, then promptly remembered that women's dress pants never really had them, and was forced to ignore the tugging at the shoulders of her blazer as she awkwardly folded them across her chest instead.

(She'd been right, by the way. They were the best dressed at the show, besides the artists and the handful of proper middle-aged-and-up adults who'd come to support their children or prove how cultured they were or whatever.)

Pinto was, luckily, oblivious (or, perhaps, merely politely feigning ignorance). "We'll make a believer out of you, yet," she gloated, elbowing her roommate only-somewhat-gently and snickering quietly.

Karen mostly resisted rolling her eyes, but the one did give a rather obvious twitch of frustration. "Let me show you my favorites," she said, with the air of someone who would very much like to change the subject.

"And then let's see your _least_ favorites." Warlock smirked at the glare Karen shot her, and accepted one the little mini quiches from a passing waiter's tray.

Pinto beamed. "Told you we would look important enough to get offered mise en place."

"Hors d'oeuvres," Warlock corrected. "And they're offering them to literally everyone, jeggings or no."

"Oh, but haven't you heard," Karen said dryly, as she led the way in weaving through the crowd. "You two are important; you've gone _viral_."

"Two thousand views is more than I expected, but it isn't exactly _viral_," Warlock protested, accidentally revealing the fact that she had, in fact, been keeping track. She ignored Karen's delighted cackle, pretending to be consumed by the phone Pinto was shoving in front of her nose.

"The comments are overwhelmingly positive," she insisted. "Look, see--'So cool! Super funny! Ready for ep 2!'"

Warlock curled her fingers around Pinto's wrist to steady the phone, leaning in and squinting. "'Hey, you two girlfriends or what?'" she read. This was a generous interpretation of the poor grammar and spelling errors, but at least the message seemed harmless, if somewhat rude.

"Yeah, we already have shippers," Pinto said, only vaguely apologetic. “Never really got that whole thing, personally, but at least it proves we’ve got on-screen chemistry.” She slipped her wrist from Warlock's grip. "'I'll tell you what I've told everyone else,'" she said slowly, thumbs flying across the screen, "'I am, unfortunately, very straight. Were I not, Warlock and I would have already run off together. Somewhere with plenty of dramatic fog and a cozy cottage. For the aesthetic, you understand.'"

Warlock snorted. "You're not my type, Thumbelina."

Pinto belted out a laugh and added, "'Though Warlock wants it on record that I am not her type.'"

They came to a stop in front of a tiny, detailed waterscape- as above the water looking down, affecting ripples and glints of sunlight through which the silty lakebed could be glimpsed- and Karen looked between the two of them, opened her mouth, and then seemed to think better of whatever she'd been about to say.

"A favorite?" Warlock prompted.

"Er, right." Karen smiled awkwardly, scratching at her nose. Pinto was still absorbed in their Youtube comments. "Miriam did this one. Her eye for detail is incredible; it's very--"

"Elegant," Warlock said politely.

"Oh, don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like there's no _substance_. It's beautiful!" Karen gestured broadly with her hands, a stubborn scowl on her face.

"Well, I mean--sure?" Warlock tried for a grin.

"There are tiny fish, and--here," she pointed carefully to a rusted-grey protuberance, buried beneath the silt and half-obscured by one of the ripples. "The edge of an anchovy tin. It's not hiding from reality, and it's neither glorifying nor crucifying it, either. It just _exists_."

"Some things need a little crucifying," Warlock protested. "I'd say littering's a fine example of one."

"Brutal honesty and reality are hardly equivalent," Karen said with a sniff, and grabbed Pinto's hand to drag her off to the next one. "There's a difference between fact and truth."

"Right," Pinto said, her eyebrows shooting up high as she looked back over her shoulder at Warlock. "What'd you _say_?" she mouthed.

Warlock gestured vaguely with her hands, narrowly avoiding knocking the tray out of the hands of a waitress, and winced, quickly retracting her limbs. "I'm too angry to be an art critic, apparently," she muttered, and Pinto made that noise that meant she was pretending to understand what Warlock was on about but that actually she didn't, at all.

"Amelia did this one," Karen declared, drawing them to a stop in front of one of the other pieces which had made full use of its space. The sculpture was set on a podium, approximately waist high, and curled like a lick of fire up to about eye level, though it was depicted in rosy shades of mauve and purple. It wasn't quite realistic and it wasn't quite cartoonish; the overall effect seemed somehow anachronistic in a way that Warlock couldn't quite put her finger on.

"Er," she said.

Karen draped an arm over Pinto's shoulders and Warlock's waist, tugging them close to admit, in a low tone, "I don't actually _like_ this one, either."

"Oh, good," Warlock said, relieved. "It can't seem to decide what it wants to be."

"It didn't quite come together, no." Karen tipped her head to the side, resting her cheek on Pinto's hair, and continued to consider it. "I appreciate the ambition, though. A lot of these are fairly…"

"Generic?" Pinto suggested.

"That's a diplomatic way of putting it," Karen agreed. "I think we're all reaching for something we're not ready for, yet, instead of figuring out who we are and letting that shape the work."

"Sounds like a good summary of university in general, to me." Pinto snorted, reaching up to pat Karen lovingly on the cheek. "Let's make a break for it," she suggested, and Warlock didn't have to look at her to know the glint in her eye that went along with that tone.

"Oh,” Karen said, vaguely flustered, “I'm meant to stay the whole time, in case people have questions--"

"But we're just down the street from that bookshop we wanted to try," Pinto said insistently. "Come on, Karen! Live a little!"

"I live plenty," she said, with a dramatic sniff.

Warlock draped her arm over Karen's shoulder, her wrist resting on the thin cotton of her dress shirt, and leaned in to whisper teasingly into her ear, "Half your classmates have already slipped the lead to go smoke a joint in the alley. I think you'll be fine."

"How do you know?" Karen snapped, and then immediately rolled her eyes. "Of course, I forgot, because you’re--"

"Because that one with the undercut and the nose piercings asked me to come with them fifteen minutes ago." Warlock felt her lips twitch at the sight of Karen's scowl.

"Artsy lesbians," Pinto said sagely. "Warned you."

"If I recall correctly, you were meaning to warn _them_," Warlock pointed out, her tone drier than the Sahara in a drought. "Come on, Cinderella, we can swing by and ask the proprietor if we can film there later this week, and we’ll still be back before the clock strikes midnight, I promise."

"Going to turn me into a _pumpkin_ if I refuse?" Karen asked, a sarcastic pop to her P's. She’d turned her face to Warlock’s, and the tips of their noses very nearly brushed. Somewhere around shoulder height, Pinto made a considering noise that Warlock pretended she didn’t hear.

Warlock's smile broke tauntingly across her face. "Might do."

"She's feeling very witchy, today," Pinto added, in that way that very close friends sometimes speak for each other without giving it a second thought. "She threatened to hex a kid on the way over."

"Well, he was a pickpocket; it was a precautionary measure,” Warlock said innocently. “Are we hitting the streets of Soho, or what?"

"I've no interest in hitting the streets,” Pinto said firmly, “as the streets have never done anything to me."

Warlock wrinkled her nose, leaning around Karen to give Pinto a sour glower. "Oh, hilarious. That's one for the presses."

"Well,” she said rather smugly, “I _am_ a journalism major."

"Ugh," Karen groaned, and extricated herself from the both of them. "Let's just go before you embarrass me in front of my cool friends."

"Yes!" Pinto pumped her fist. "Come on, I've got the address saved on my phone." She waved the device in the air as if to prove the point.

Warlock rolled up the sleeves of her blazer with a couple practiced flicks of the wrist before she led the way to the door. "Let me see," she demanded, holding out an impatient hand, and Pinto obliged her.

The images of the shop that accompanied its Google Maps entry had obviously taken by customers (_not_ as publicity shots) based on the poor lighting and odd angles, and they showed an impressive corner lot with a rather less impressive (in fact, a quite run down) bit of signage, with all kinds of dust and grime in the windows. It was the vintage car, partially visible in the corner of one of the pictures, that actually sparked her memory, though. "Oh," she said, "I know this place."

"Yeah?" Pinto accepted her phone back.

"Never been in," Warlock corrected, before she could ask. "I've just seen it around; left a business card on the car parked out front last time I printed a set. But it does seem like the sort of place that might have an extensive collection of occult works, at least from the outside."

“I’ll take that as a good omen,” Pinto declared, quick stepping around Warlock to take the lead as a polite, computer generated voice told her to head south.

“And I’ll take your taking it as a good omen as a bad omen, just so that our bases are covered,” Karen said dryly.

“You have a bitter soul, oh roommate mine.”

“I’m not normally the mom friend!” Karen threw her hands in the air, her voice hitting a vaguely shrill note. “You two just egg each other on into complete madness! It’s like you’re both incredibly intelligent people whose--whose wavelengths do that thing.” She made a peevish gesture, flapping one hand all about. “The cancellation thing, where your peaks are perfectly out of sync so that together you just--”

Pinto was watching Karen's hands with an airy sort of bemusement. “Haven’t the slightest what you’re on about.”

The erratic gesturing turned into pointed faux-strangling.

Warlock took pity on the both of them. “Destructive interference,” she supplied. “It’s a sound waves, physics thing. It's how noise-canceling headphones work.”

(She had actually been very close to being a physics major, which isn’t nearly as odd of a statement as it seems if you consider that philosophers used to do most of the scientific heavy lifting, once upon a time. When the college acceptance letters started rolling in, she had had to select between being a physicist and being a philosopher--and one of those had looked more entertaining on the business card. Not that that’s generally a recommended method for making life changing decisions.)

“I suppose I vaguely recall covering that at some point.” Pinto said it like a fact, but it sounded very much like a lie. Warlock snorted.

"Anyway,” Karen said, still peevish despite Warlock’s charming assistance with the word choice, “you two are both _so smart_, but when you speak to each other, it's like all of that cancels out so you both become complete _idiots_."

"Thank you," Pinto said, genuinely touched. "That's what best friends are for."

"I have never," Karen said tiredly, "been so glad to not be considered your best friend."

"Not going to fight over me like Joey and Ross fighting over Chandler?"

"No, I'm quite happy to be a third wheel. Lets me keep my sanity. Besides--you're delusional if you think it wouldn't be the two of us fighting over _Warlock_."

"She is the coolest of the three of us."

Karen spluttered. "That is not what I meant--"

Warlock came to a stop, even as Karen and Pinto continued walking, their bickering carrying them ever onwards. She raised an eyebrow, glancing up at the faded sign Mr. A. Z. Fell had put up to help peddle his wares, and then back to her friends, who were crossing the street without the slightest hesitation. The computer generated-voice sounded almost peevish as it ordered them to turn around.

Warlock cleared her throat pointedly. "Ladies?" she called, crossing her arms over her chest.

"What?" Pinto turned around, walking backwards down the street and spreading her hands out to the sides sarcastically. "Get a move on, would you?"

Warlock looked at the sign once more, with mounting exasperation. She looked back at Pinto.

"_What_?"

"What, what?" Warlock threw her hands in the air. "You walked right past it!" She patted the frame of the building, both eyebrows now shot high up her forehead.

"Oh," Karen said. There was a slightly strange expression on her face as she peered back at the bookshop, and she shook it off a moment later.

"Huh." Pinto was too busy looking down at her phone. "Didn't even notice."

"Yeah," Warlock said. She glanced at the building, eyes narrowing. "Did you do that?" she demanded quietly, and got a fleeting sense of smugness.

Oh, this was a bad idea, wasn't it?

"Into the breach!" Pinto declared, snagging Warlock's arm with one hand and stabbing the other dramatically into the air.

"Into the bookshop," Warlock corrected, even as she threateningly fired off that universal sign for "I'm watching you" to the nearest bit of bookshop façade.

(Perhaps Karen had a point.)

Pinto went to fling open the door, and instead stumbled into it. "Damn," she muttered, releasing Warlock's arm to rub at her sore shoulder. "Locked."

Warlock glared suspiciously at the brass knob. "Probably just stuck," she said pleasantly, and reached around Pinto to turn it herself. "See," she said, with a smile full of teeth. "Just needs the magic touch."

A string of bells rang rather pathetically as she stepped inside, holding the door and gesturing Karen and Pinto across the threshold with the sweep of her arm.

"He's closed!" A voice yelled, from somewhere deep in the stacks.

"Door was unlocked!" Warlock yelled back, stalking forward into the dim, dusty shop, with its rows and rows of elegant, pristine, _ancient_ tomes. It was, with the kind of sentience buildings did not usually show (no matter how old they were), laughing at her. She could smell it in the air—a wry, clever sort of amusement, like the place was delighted for her to be challenging it.

"Doesn't change the fact that he's closed!" The voice snapped, sounding downright irritable now.

Warlock barked a laugh. "Sign in the window says ‘Open’!"

Karen was staring at her in the horrified embarrassment of the polite when faced with extreme rudeness perpetrated by someone they couldn't claim not to know, but Warlock didn't know how to explain, so she didn’t. "American," she mouthed, pointing at herself, and Karen went from embarrassment to annoyance in one wrinkle of her nose.

"We, er--" Pinto broke off into a sneeze and then tried again, louder. "We just wanted to ask--"

She broke off with a yelp as she ran into Warlock's abruptly still back.

"It's you," Warlock sneered, swaying but keeping her feet after the collision, and her upstairs neighbor looked up from where he'd draped himself sort of sideways (yet also sort of backwards) over a desk as he played on his phone.

He scowled right back, straightening up and dropping his phone carelessly to the side with a hearty clatter. "Angry lumberjack," he greeted, those too-lanky limbs arranging themselves into something faux-demure where he perched on the edge of the desk, his face stretching with a smile that quite literally had too many teeth. He was still wearing the sunglasses. "Should've known. _Was_ the door unlocked, then?"

"This time," Warlock said cagily, and he barked a laugh. She could feel his eyes on her even if she couldn't see them, sharp and inhuman--but less dangerous, here. The bookshop, she suspected, was a capricious beast; it had switched from trying to drive her and her friends off to being amused- and protective- the second she'd threatened it.

"So, Paulina Bunyan," he drawled, with a voice that promised all kinds of fuzzy, nebulous things that you could find out all about if you just listened to whatever this- man- had to say. "What d'you want, then?"

"Oh!" Pinto had been hanging back--held back, actually, by Karen, who had enough sense to know that something was going on that she didn't understand. But now she hurried up next to Warlock, a beaming smile on her face. "We've got a paranormal investigation show on Youtube--" He laughed, but Pinto barreled onwards diligently-- "and there's some research we'd like to do. We were hoping to speak to Mr. Fell to see if he had anything in stock that would help us, and if he'd be willing to let us film here if he did."

"So you don't want to buy any books?" One eyebrow arched up above the sunglasses.

"Well," Pinto said, somewhat awkwardly. "Not as such."

"Oh!" A second voice drifted out from even further back in the stacks. "That's alright then!"

It was that moment again--sensing before seeing, knowing what's happening as it happens instead of after.

A man who could be assumed to be Mr. A. Z. Fell- dressed in pastels and creams and tans, unnaturally white, flyaway hair curling around his ears- emerged from the back, beaming grandly, and said, "Crowley, be a dear and put the tea on, would--" He broke off, stumbling as he saw Warlock, and caught himself on the desk.

They stared at each other for a long moment, his grip white knuckled and his mouth hanging slightly open. Warlock's knees felt a little weak. 

"Aziraphale?" Crowley asked, a note of concern in his voice.

"Warlock Dowling," Aziraphale said, sounding breathless and delighted all at once.

"Brother Francis," she returned, remarkably calm. Funny that he'd be so easy to recognize, even without the buckteeth and the sideburns. No one human could project so much goodwill and so much smugness, all at once.

Crowley's head snapped around--from Aziraphale to Warlock and back again, his lips twisting into a disbelieving sneer. "Warlock?!?" he said, voice high with incredulity. "That's _not_ Warlock."

"Of course she is!"

"_Warlock_," he snapped, with a voice like the worst, most condescending professor you've ever had, "is about yea high--" he made a gesture only somewhat above his hip-- "not _taller _than_ me_."

"My dear," Aziraphale said, bemused, "it's been over seven years. Children do grow up, you know."

"Seven years?" Crowley choked. There was something almost like guilt in the way he shifted on the desk. "Has _not_."

Aziraphale looked at him with a compassionate sort of pity in his eyes, his voice soft. "I'm afraid so."

"I didn't recognize you without him, either, Nanny," Warlock said. Her voice sounded like it was a thousand miles away from her ears. She had no idea what she was meant to do with her hands—they hung loosely at her sides, fingertips numb and awkward.

"Nanny?" Pinto asked, her own voice tipped high. "Like, _that _nanny? Taught you to pick a lock when you were five, Nanny?"

Aziraphale gasped, scandalized, and Crowley pulled a face. "Things always do come back to bite me in the ass," he muttered, and leapt down from the desk.

Instinctively, Warlock threw out her arms to shove Pinto and Karen back, keeping herself between them and the two-- the two-- "I think I'd like some answers," she said, ignoring the guilt that roiled in her stomach at the surprise and hurt on Aziraphale's face and the way Crowley's shuttered into blankness. The bookshop muttered reproachfully in the back of her mind.

"We can't tell you," Crowley said flatly.

"That is to say," Aziraphale said apologetically, "that we're rather not supposed to, and while we've, er, gone into retirement--"

"Swan dived out of employment with both middle fingers up," Crowley interjected, and Aziraphale glowered.

"--It's still best not to tempt fate, or the Higher Ups, or the Lower--well," he broke himself off with a cough. "You'd hardly believe us, regardless."

"I think you owe me," Warlock snapped. "After everything, I think you _owe me_."

"I'm sorry, my dear," Aziraphale-- Brother Francis-- Mr. Fell, said, and she felt a muscle tick in her jaw.

Warlock Dowling may have been a witch, but she was not, in the grand scheme of things, a naturally _powerful_ witch. Still, she'd always had a _knack_ for the magics of perception--this was how she knew things she shouldn't have known, how she could make a creep at a bar see her as a monster, how she could stop at the doorstep of a recalcitrant bookshop as her friends walked right past without noticing it.

So, fine. It was fine. They didn't want to tell her? That was _fine_. It was all about confidence--it was all about intent. She raised her hand, demanding, "Show me who you really are."

Warlock snapped her fingers.

* * *

Nothing happened.

"Er," Aziraphale said.

Warlock's brow furrowed, and she stared at her hand in silent betrayal. Why hadn't--oh. She raised her hand again. "Show me _what_ you really are," she ordered, and Crowley's eyes went wide behind his glasses.

"Wait," he said, flinging out a hand--

Warlock snapped her fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The good friend to whom this fic is dedicated recently provided me with this meme:


	4. To Save This Message, Press 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warlock blinked away the afterimages with a shake of her head. "That wasn't exactly what I expected," she said, far more calmly than she felt. No fairy godparents, then, she mused. Just one more thing Nickelodeon got wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief mentions of/allusions to alcoholism and transphobia in this chapter. There are also a couple particularly blasphemous jokes? I assume that's probably not a thing that bothers you if you made it through the show and/or book and came out the other side looking for fanfiction, but I figured I'd mention it.
> 
> I desperately hope this doesn't disappoint! This is the first time in FOREVER I've actually posted something serially instead of in a single chapter, so I'll be over here tugging nervously at my collar thinking "Woah, is it hot in here or is it just me?" until somebody tells me they loved it. (Don't worry; it can be a lie!)

Sometimes, Warlock would reflect later, it was a _good_ thing that she didn't have much in the way of magical prowess. After all, had she _actually_ succeeded in forcing her erstwhile godparents into their natural forms, she may very well have killed herself- and Karen and Pinto- in the process.

No, there were no burning rings or halos or slobbery creatures of the depths manifest in Soho that afternoon. Here's what happened:

Warlock snapped her fingers.

The light in the bookshop--_changed_. Two sets of wings- jagged, ephemeral things, one producing a nearly blinding light even as the other hungrily absorbed it- erupted into existence, though they seemed as if they were neither physically _here_ nor elsewhere, all at once, and the very fact that she was looking at them changed the nature of their existence.

_It comes back_, Warlock thought, _to Schrödinger_. _Because of course it does_.

The light (and non-light) flickered out of existence after just a moment, and Warlock blinked away the afterimages with a shake of her head. "That wasn't exactly what I expected," she said, far more calmly than she felt. _No fairy godparents, then_, she mused. _Just one more thing Nickelodeon got wrong_.

"What was that?!?" Karen's voice had gone completely shrill, and her eyes were wide and frantic. She pointed back and forth between Aziraphale and Crowley with a shaking hand. "You--" She looked at Warlock. "You--!"

"Witch?" Warlock offered. She side-eyed Pinto, vaguely concerned by the grey tone of her skin.

Karen spluttered. "I thought--!"

"Karen." Warlock caught her by the chin, dragging her eyes up to meet her own. "Later," she hissed, and then stepped back to neatly catch Pinto as she fainted.

"A witch," Aziraphale said faintly. "You'd think we'd have noticed--"

"An _idiot_ is what she is," Crowley snapped. He took several pointed steps in her direction, prodding furiously at the air. "D’you know what could have happened, 'Lock? Do you? That kind of magic is _dangerous_ for humans—"

“My dear, I don't think she has the kind of power necessary to drag our celestial--"

"Occult," Crowley corrected automatically.

"--forms off of their respective planes of existence," Aziraphale said soothingly, but his fingers were flitting nervously over the buttons of his waistcoat, his smile strained about the edges.

"How did she know that?" Crowley snarled, and his tongue flickered, briefly, into something forked.

Karen made a noise that was impossible to be described in words and left Warlock faintly concerned. "Let's sit," she advised, scooping Pinto up into her arms. "And then," she added, voice like a whip crack, "_you two_ can explain."

"Of course," Aziraphale said, somewhat meekly, and ushered them properly into the back room of the shop. It was much bigger than it should have been, and Warlock bumped the doorframe companionably with her shoulder as she passed.

(She could, she thought, use someone on her side. Even if that someone was a sentient bookshop.)

The girls took up the couch, Warlock in the center with Karen to her left and Pinto slumped into her from the right. Her deadbeat not-fairy godparents took up an armchair across the coffee table that hadn't been in that position a moment before.

(Karen made that indescribable noise of existential crisis again, and Warlock quite nearly echoed it when Crowley settled on the arm much as she'd imagined, that night in the barn.)

"Where would you like us to start?" Aziraphale asked. His voice was gentle, and his blue eyes were earnest and kind and _old_, in a way that made the hair prickle at the back of Warlock's neck.

She shifted, resisting the urge to slide into a moody slouch, and drummed her fingers on the back of the couch as she carefully cultivated an aura of disaffection. "The beginning, seems good."

He smiled. "Oh, I'm sure I can--"

Crowley slapped a hand over his mouth with a thin-lipped smile. "Once upon a time," he drawled, and it was sarcastic and English and still, still echoing back into memories of a soft Scottish brogue she'd long thought forgotten.

Warlock flinched.

He noticed, and those lines at the corners of his lips finally softened. "Once upon a time," Crowley repeated, quietly. More sincere. "There was an angel who guarded the Eastern Gate of Eden, and a serpent who'd been sent up to make a bit of trouble.” He gestured vaguely. “You know how that all went down—which is to say, not _well_.”

“You’re kidding me,” Warlock said sourly. “You’re not honestly trying to imply that _you_ were—"

“Do you want your precious answers or not, string bean?” Crowley asked sharply, and Warlock reluctantly ground her teeth as she crossed her arms over her chest. He glared at her a moment longer, then cracked his neck and huffed. “Alright, well. In the aftermath of Eden, they were both assigned to Earth; the angel to protect the humans, the demon to tempt them, and neither of them were very good at their jobs, all told. But six thousand years came and went, and they rather came to like the place, and the people--" he shot a look at Aziraphale-- "and the food, and the books, and sometimes the musical theatre. So when the demon was handed a basket with a baby- an Antichrist who would bring on the end of the world, the actual, _literal_ Apocalypse- they hatched a plan."

"Two sets of influences," Aziraphale said, drawing Crowley's hand down from his mouth to rest on his shoulder instead. "On the mandate of hell, the one would encourage the child towards conquering the world, while the other would illicitly encourage a compassion for all living things. They agreed to act at cross-purposes, a literal angel and demon on the child's shoulder, in order to prevent the true formation of evil and raise him--"

"Her," Crowley corrected smoothly, "even if they didn't know it at the time."

"Yes, my dear, of course, but--" Aziraphale shifted. "Well, you see, the thing is."

"Oh," Crowley said with a wince. "Right. Well. The demon didn't exactly _stay_ to observe the baby swap."

"And, you see, there were two women giving birth at the nunnery that night--"

"They got swapped twice," Crowley said bluntly. "The Antichrist ended up in some pipsqueak village in Oxfordshire with an accountant for a father, and the accountant's kid ended up with the American diplomat."

Warlock stared at them. They looked back at her, defiant and guilty and uncomfortable in turn.

She cleared her throat. "Right," she said, her pulse hammering inside her throat as she jerkily disentangled herself from Pinto and shot to her feet. "I think I've heard enough," she added, tugging at her blazer to straighten it as she looked around desperately for--for what? Ah, right. Warlock stepped carefully around the coffee table, then strode determinedly towards the door.

"I mean, this is--" she spun on her heel as she reached it, taking several steps back into the room, one hand extended in front of herself. "This is a huge relief, actually, if I'm being honest. I mean, I used to think I was a disappointment, right?" Warlock could hear herself getting hysterical, but she couldn't stop, throwing out the words like knives and watching Aziraphale flinch and Crowley's jaw get tighter and tighter. "I thought I _bored you_, and that's why you left! But, no, it's great, to know that you were never interested in _me_ in the first place-- The only people from my childhood who were ever-- It's a _huge relief_," she snarled, and swiped with annoyance at the wetness on her cheeks. "Thanks for nothing, hope to see you never."

"My dear girl," Aziraphale said, looking utterly stricken, and moved to stand.

"Don't you DARE follow me!" Warlock yelled, and immediately felt shame flare over her cheeks. She _outgrew_ this, years ago, she—

"Don't you dare," she snapped, her tone better under control as her chest heaved with the effort to hold it in. "This is my story now, all right? _I'm writing it_. Maybe it was never meant to be mine, maybe I was--" her voice broke on a sob-- "Maybe I was meant to be some accountant's daughter in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, maybe this was meant for-- for that other boy-- but this is my story _now_, do you understand me? I did this _myself_. I chose to be a witch, I chose to come-- to c-come to London, I chose to make the best f-friends I've ever had in my entire life, I _chose_ this s-story, and it is _mine_, and-- and I don't _want you_ to be a _part_ of it anymore; do you _understand me_?"

Crowley's hand came down on Aziraphale's shoulder once more, his knuckles white as he held him in his seat. "We understand," he said quietly, expression inscrutable behind those dark lenses, and Warlock nodded jerkily.

"Great," she said, hating the way her voice cracked around the word, "that's great. Karen--"

"Yeah," she said hurriedly, standing and dragging a groggily confused Pinto up with her. "Yeah, let's get out of here."

Warlock barreled out of the dim lighting of the bookshop into a bright- if overcast- London day, and froze on the sidewalk as that stupid vintage car stared back at her. She shouldn't have been surprised- what were the odds that _two_ of her neighbors found themselves here regularly enough to end up on Google Street View- but she found she still was. She hadn't noticed it, when they’d first arrived.

The headlights were big, and round, and pitying her.

"Don't look at me like that," she accused gruffly, and accepted the little travel pack of tissues that Karen was extending her way.

"Not looking at you any particular way," Karen assured her, not realizing she'd been speaking to the car, and Warlock didn't bother to correct her.

She swiped aggressively at her nose, stubbornly breathing through the sobs which still threatened to wrack her lungs if she allowed them purchase, and flagged down a cab. "Do you mind getting her—” her chest heaved— “to the dorm before you go back to your show?" she asked, peeling off several bills and knocking on the front window to hand them in to the cabbie.

Pinto was still shaky and out of it and listing slightly to the side, and Karen had a white knuckled grip on her shoulder and a nervous furrow to her brow. She allowed herself to be shepherded towards the taxi, but not without reluctance. "Aren't you coming--?" she asked hesitantly, pausing half in and half out as Pinto slowly dragged herself across to the far seat.

"I need--" Warlock sucked in a great, shuddering breath. She couldn't meet Karen's earnest brown gaze, for fear that she'd crack apart right then and there. "I need to be alone for a bit." She tried for an encouraging smile. "Get my head on straight."

"You've never been straight a day in your life," Pinto roused enough to mumble accusingly, and Warlock let out a desperate bark of laughter.

"Damn right I haven't," she agreed. "Look--" she closed the door for them, but clung to its open window for a moment longer, letting herself feel the weight of her emotional exhaustion for a split second before she banished it, with effort. "Come over tomorrow," she blurted, "even if I act like I don't want you to."

"Couldn't keep me away," Pinto grumbled, despite being bent over with her head between her knees.

"If she pukes," the cabbie threatened.

Warlock bared her teeth. "I already handed you more than enough cash to cover fare _and_ dry cleaning."

"Who's to say how much that cleaning'd really cost?" The man hedged, and wheedled, and possibly tried for a little extorting as well. "Seems to me--"

"I can handle the difference when we get to the other end, if she does end up puking," Karen said, calmly, with her artist's hand rubbing soothingly between Pinto's shoulder blades. "Go," she added, to Warlock this time. "We'll see you tomorrow."

Obediently (for perhaps the first time in her life), Warlock stepped back up onto the curb and let them drive away.

She regretted it, nearly at once.

"Fuck." She covered her eyes with one shaking hand, the other gripping tightly at her own hip, as if she could hold herself together if she just squeezed hard enough. "_Fuck_," she added, with feeling, and flipped off Crowley's car because it was bearing witness to the whole scene. "Tell him to stop parking in the fucking vespa spots," she snapped, and turned on her heel to march off.

By the end of the block, she'd shed the blazer, rolling her suddenly bare shoulders beneath the weak afternoon sun and trying to breathe. She couldn't stop thinking about it--she'd been right but she'd been wrong. She _had_ been living in a Chosen One story, except she'd been Chosen to _end the world_\--and actually, _she_ hadn't been chosen at all. Nanny and Brother Francis were magic, but they weren't Fair Folk. (And they'd never--)

One kind soul who was waiting at a bus stop looked at the redness of her face, her puffy cheeks and swollen nose and opened their mouth to ask if she was alright. Warlock snarled, and changed direction.

She probably should have been wondering who the other boy was--what he was like, if he'd ever been tempted to actually end the world. (_Would she have gone through with it? If it had been her?_ Warlock shied away from the thought skittishly, unable to consider it head on. She'd been a bitter, spoiled child, prone to tantrums and self-pity. _No wonder_, she thought with a sour edge of exhaustion, _they hadn't wanted to stick around once they figured out the truth_.)

But Warlock could have cared less about the other kid. It was the other _parents_ that made her feel sick.

She _looked_ like the Dowlings; she had Thaddeus's strong features, or at least she'd always thought she did, and she had Harriet's complexion--and her sense of humor, the slight uptick to her nose. (Did she look like the Antichrist? Did they have a _third_ doppelgänger running around out there somewhere, the kid who should have been raised by Harriet and Tad?) But resemblance be damned, she wasn't related to them; she had other parents out there in the world, biological ones. Would her other mother have been less distant?

Would the accountant have been less of a prick about having a transgender daughter?

Warlock dropped onto a park bench, staring unseeing out across the grassy field and the rambunctious children spread out before her. _Did it matter?_ she asked herself, hunching down over her knees with her weight rested painfully on her palms on the edge of the bench. That wasn't how it had happened; so what was the point in what if's? To make herself upset and wallow in her self-pity? To give herself a reason to be angry about what had been stolen from her?

It was easier to be angry; she'd always known that. _Maybe_, she added sardonically, rubbing at the bridge of her nose, _because I was raised by a literal _demon_ who was trying to encourage me to _start the apocalypse.

_I'm focusing on these things_, she told herself, her fingers clamped down harshly over the lip of the bench, _because it's easiest to be mad about things that don't matter as much, instead of acknowledging the things that make me vulnerable_. Warlock closed her eyes, and she set aside the anger, for the moment.

_I'm hurt_, she admitted, with fresh tears teasing at the corners of her eyes. _It's not because I'm not as important as I used to think I was because that's a relief, actually. It's not because they lied to me because I'd always assumed they had. It's not because I wish I'd had different parents, even though sometimes I do_.

_It's because--_

_Because I always wanted them to come back. Because I did all of this on my own, and I wish I hadn't had to. Because I missed them, and they were lounging around in Soho playing house and not even realizing seven years were passing them by_.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and Warlock fumbled to pull it out, rapidly blinking away the tears.

_FWD: Flight Itinerary_, the email alert read. She huffed, opening it only with the intention to clear the notification, but—

_Hey, Warlock,_

_Here’s the flight information, as promised, and I’ve already booked a cab both directions, so no need to worry about picking me up. I’ll be getting in early Thursday morning, and heading out late Saturday so I have time to get over the jetlag before work on Monday. I’m thinking about booking a hotel so as not to impose on you too much; let me know if there’s one particularly convenient to your apartment._

_I’m looking forward to seeing you, sweetheart._

_Mom_

Warlock squeezed her eyes shut, shoving the phone back into her pocket. _How is that fair_? she asked herself hysterically. _How is it fair that she finally starts to act like she has even a vague interest in my life, and I find out all of this_?

* * *

There was a little red light flashing on the answering machine.

Warlock sat curled on her couch in the corner of the L, facing the wrong direction and hugging a cushion to her chest, her arms going to sleep where the elbows rested on the back of the couch. She watched the light blink on and off.

It could, of course, be anyone--there were fifty of her business cards floating about London, after all. But Warlock kept seeing it over and over in her mind's eye: her own hand reaching out, tucking the plain white card with its plain black text beneath the windshield wiper of that shiny vintage car. She remembered rolling her eyes at herself. She remembered walking away, certain that the worst that could come of it would be a bit of a row with one of her neighbors about their blatantly illegal (and personally inconvenient) parking jobs.

How was she supposed to know the damn thing belonged to her childhood nanny? She wasn't psychic, no matter how it looked sometimes.

Her chin dug into the top of the cushion. A traitorous little voice in the back of her head was telling her that it had to happen eventually, so she should just listen to it already; get it over with and drown her sorrows in one of the seven half-tubs of dairy free "ice cream" Pinto had left in her freezer. There may even be a clean spoon somewhere, despite the nearly full dishwasher. Warlock always ran out of forks first.

But the voice in her head was _wrong_. She didn't have to listen to the message; she could just _erase _it without ever--

Ugh.

_Oh, Warlock_, she thought snidely. _You can't even fool yourself in your own head. You like questions with no answers, but only when you can philosophize about them; only when they have nothing to do with you_ _as an individual instead of you as a member of the human race. You'll go insane if you don't listen to it--it'll eat you up inside, the not knowing. The never knowing. Apocalypse 2: the Personal Self-Destruction of A Girl Who is Not the Antichrist, Isn't That Nice for All of Us, Because She Would Have Done It, Probably._

_We'll Never Know, Will We?_

Her thoughts caught her like a blow to the stomach, and she jerked away from the cushion as if burned. More or less, anyway--there wasn't much feeling in her arms, after all of the brooding.

With a pained grunt, Warlock staggered to her feet and paced the length of her living room, refusing to think about who might be pacing above her head. She rolled her shoulders repeatedly, trying to work the blood flow back into her extremities, until finally she turned back towards the answering machine. Her fingertips were still tingling, full of pins and needles.

The little red light blinked at her.

Her conscience cleared its throat politely.

"Yeah, whatever," Warlock sniffed. "Fuck you, too." With two long strides, she reached the end table and jabbed a determined finger into the small black button labeled "Play Messages."

_YOU HAVE ONE NEW MESSAGE_, the computer voice told her. _MESSAGE RECEIVED AT 15:49 ON OCTOBER 28TH, IN THE 7TH YEAR POST-NONPOCALYPSE, WHICH IS A MUCH BETTER MILESTONE THAN THE TIME THAT POOR GIRL GOT IMPREGNATED BY GOD AND DIDN'T EVEN GET A ONE NIGHT STAND OUT OF THE DEAL, DON'T YOU THINK_?

"Oh, good," she said, because it was always easiest to be snide when you had no idea how else to feel. "He broke my answering machine."

"_First of all_," Crowley's voice said, too fast and too loud, as the recording started, "_I didn't do that on purpose and I have no idea how to fix it. Maybe whack it a couple of times, that always seems to work on TV when the main character is faced with some malfunctioning electronics. It's true, though; I mean--not the point._

"_Seven years. That's the point. I'm six thousand years old; seven years is nothing. I've taken _naps_ that lasted seven years. I never meant-- I didn't-- ngk," _he broke off, sounding miserable. "_Look, I've never apologized to anyone other than Aziraphale before. He'd probably argue I've never apologized to him, either._

_"Warlock, I--" _He breathed out sharply. "_I should have… been there. I intended to be. But I was too caught up in--this, the whole thing, the freedom of no longer answering directly to the big man downstairs, and I lost track of time. It's so _easy _to misplace the damn stuff; worse than socks in the dryer. One of mine, by the way. Not the _point.

"_I remember what Tad was like, and no matter how much Harriet loved you, she never could quite figure out how to be a mother; I can't imagine things being easy for you, even if you didn't need us. Which, obviously, look at you, you never needed us, you clever thing--but we should have been there. I wish we had been. I wish we still could be._

"_But, er, you've made it quite clear what you want from us, these days. I shouldn't even be calling you, but I'd kept this card for months with no idea why, and then I recognized the smell of your magic on it after you left the shop today. So I just--_" He broke off into another incomprehensible noise. "_I'm rambling. Wanted to tell you we're moving. We've been talking about it for a while, a nice little cottage on the South Downs, so this is just--well. The impetus to finally make it happen. London is all yours, kid._"

There was a long pause, as if he wasn't sure if he should end the message there. And then, quietly, he murmured, "_We're proud of you, you know._"

_TO REPLAY THIS MESSAGE, PRESS 2. TO SAVE THIS MESSAGE, PRESS 4. TO ERASE THIS MESSAGE, PRESS 666--_

Warlock's hand shot out, jabbing the four button on the landline before she could think about it for too long. She squeezed her eyes shut, fingers curling so tightly into a fist that her nails bit painfully into the meat of her palm. Should she--

She should--

Someone whistled, long and low, and Warlock snapped around quickly enough that she nearly knocked herself over. "Heavy," Pinto said, from where she stood just inside the door of the apartment, looking exhausted and worried and ignoring Karen where she hovered awkwardly over her shoulder.

"Um." Warlock ran a hand through her hair- loose, for once- and flicked her eyes nervously from one of them to the other to the closed door behind them. "I said--I said come over tomorrow, not--"

"You gave me a key for a reason," Pinto told her.

Warlock felt her shoulders slump, unbidden. "Yeah," she said, voice breaking, and suddenly they were both moving, flinging their arms around each other as they met in the middle of the room and sinking to the floor in a messy jumble. Her knees hit the plush area rug with a painful jolt, but Warlock could care less.

"Are you okay? I'm so s-sorry, Pinto, I--"

"Am I okay?!?" Pinto asked shrilly. "Am _I_ okay?!? One of us confronted the most painful memories in her life today, buddy, and it wasn't me, was it? _Am I okay_, honestly." She wriggled back just far enough to give herself room and pressed her forehead firmly into Warlock's, one of her small-strong hands curled almost painfully over the nape of her neck and the other brushing her tears away impatiently. "I'm sorry I fainted. I'm sorry I couldn't be awake to kick their ass for you when you needed me to. I mean--I'll still do it. You want me to do it? I'll do it. The only demons that scare me are the kind you find in the bottom of a bottle, what with the history of alcoholism in my family and everything."

"You're my best friend," Warlock told her desperately. She screwed her eyes shut, her whole face twisting painfully. There were all kinds of words jumbled up in her throat, ones that you couldn't just say to another person.

("You're strong and smart and funny, and you make me a better person, and I need you not to leave. I'm glad you never listen to me. I'm glad you have no idea what personal boundaries even are, much less how to respect them. I'm glad you're my best friend. I'm glad I know you. I’m glad you’re here. You're my family.")

"Love you, too, witchy woman," Pinto mumbled, throwing her arms back around Warlock properly and burying her nose in her neck. "Look, I said it and the world didn't even end."

Warlock clutched at her shoulders and heaved a sob. "I'm so sorry," she said again. She wasn't sure what she was apologizing for, any more.

"Dumb," Pinto said. "So smart, and you're so dumb. Why is Karen always right, huh? Maybe she's secretly a witch, too. Let's burn her at the stake."

Warlock broke into hysterical laughter, and Pinto cheered quietly, rocking them back and forth. "There's my girl. Hey, I have a question--can you really turn people into frogs?"

"No," Warlock said thickly, and Karen cleared her throat delicately as she held out a box of tissues.

"Really?" Pinto asked, not bothering to mask her disappointment. "And that pickpocket--"

"Can't hex people's fingers off either."

"Useless. You're useless to me."

"Sorry."

Pinto's hand smoothed over her hair, and she hummed, low in her throat. "How are you?" she asked, impossibly gentle, and Warlock managed to uncurl her hands from her thin, stylish sweater and sit back, swiping at her face with Karen's proffered tissues.

"Like I should've changed out of these stupid dress clothes before I had my emotional breakdown," she mumbled, abruptly aware of the way her dress pants bit into her hips and her blazer tugged at her shoulders.

"And?" Pinto prompted.

"And what?" Warlock asked, exhausted and irritable. "And the only people who ever seemed to like me when I was a kid apparently completely forgot about me once they realized I wasn't the Antichrist, and I can't even blame them because I was boring and bratty, and--"

"You were a _kid_," Karen snapped. "You were a _fucking kid_."

"What do you want from me?" Warlock snarled. "Do you want me to cry? Been there, done that, got the _fucking_ T shirt. Do you want me to be angry? What good is it going to--"

"_Are_ you angry?" Pinto asked, breaking through the tension like a bull with a very specific vendetta against a bookshop.

"What?" Warlock asked, flummoxed.

"Are you angry?" Pinto repeated patiently. "It's an emotion; you either feel it or you don't."

She swallowed hard, not looking at either of them as her fingers dug deeply into the rug. "I don't want to be," she said quietly. "I used to be angry a lot. I thought the world owed me a lot of things and that it should be a certain way, and I didn't like when it wasn't."

"Given what we now know about who was raising you and what their operating assumptions were, that's not exactly a surprise," Karen said dryly. She dropped down onto the couch, nudging Warlock comfortingly with the toe of her sock. "But you are, though. Aren't you?"

Warlock clamped one hand over her eyes, taking a deep shuddering breath and clinging to her knees with her other arm. "I'm furious," she said, voice shaking. "At _myself_. Because I'm not angry at them. I just-- I just want--"

"You're allowed to forgive them," Pinto said softly. "If that's what you want to do, you're allowed to forgive them."

"I don't want to do that either," Warlock said, voice breaking all over again. "God, if I could just stop fucking crying for one fucking minute--"

"You'll figure it out." Pinto threw an arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her temple. "And in the meantime, I bet we can sell witch's tears on eBay."

"_Pinto_," Karen said, exasperated, but Warlock was laughing again, slumping sideways and letting herself be held up.

"I hate you," she said, and hiccuped.

"No, you don't," Pinto said confidently. "I'm your best friend."

"Oh, who says?" Warlock scoffed.

"You do, jackass."

"Ugh. Right."

Pinto squeezed her briefly and then rose to her feet, dusting off the knees of her skinny legged dress pants, and cracked her neck to either side as she stretched her arms. "Pancakes," she said decisively. "Let's make pancakes and just absolutely cover them in whipped cream and fruit."

"It's like 10 PM," Warlock protested.

"By the time we're ready to eat, it'll be a delicious late-night dessert," Karen pointed out, rising to her feet as well and holding out a hand to help Warlock up. She wiggled her fingers impatiently, a stubborn scowl in the corners of her lips. "C'mon, we're making pancakes."

Warlock didn't move for a long moment. She felt wrung out and tired and unfit for the sight of other humans, and they were here anyway. Commandeering her kitchen and her food and probably her sound system, soon to be making a mess and playing terrible pop music and getting mad for her instead of at her, and it was the most magical thing she'd ever seen.

She took Karen's hand.

* * *

Warlock paused the documentary she was watching and reached for her cell phone, flipping her braid back over her shoulder as she curled into the corner of her couch and let it ring.

"_What is it this time; I won a cruise, I'm behind on my taxes, or I'm wanted by the FBI? I'm on the do not call list, if you're a normal, non-robotic telemarketing scam_," Crowley said, sounding distracted and staticky, like he had put her on speaker and walked away.

"What's the scoop on evolution?" Warlock asked, and jerked the phone away from her ear as something crashed loudly enough to shake the building. She shot an exasperated look at her ceiling, and listened to the muffled fumbling and swearing as Crowley (presumably) launched himself back across the room for his phone.

"_Er_," he said, feigning nonchalance despite the uptick in his breathing. "_Utter rubbish, I'm afraid. The Creationists have it in the bag_."

Warlock squinted at her television. "The fossil record?" she asked suspiciously, as the paleontologist in the documentary remained frozen in the middle of an excited explanation of the revelation represented by that one particular bone she'd dug up the year before.

"_Great big cosmic joke_."

"What's the punchline?" Warlock demanded, and he made an unintelligible noise before going silent for a long, long time. "You have no idea, do you?" she snickered.

"_Well, see_\--"

"Then how do you know it's a _joke_?"

"_Because I was there for Creation_," he said irritably. "_She skipped straight to the regular sized lizards and things_."

"But is that even how it works?" she asked, nose wrinkling up as she followed her thoughts down their rabbit hole. "I mean--okay, you said that you're six thousand years old _and _that you were there for Creation, so presumably you've been alive since the universe began, and the universe is six thousand years old."

"_Sort of. Time wasn't really a _concept_ back then._"

"So the six thousand years is just counting up since the concept of time was invented?"

"_I suppose_."

"So--so that doesn't mean time didn't _exist_, just that you had no way to judge or conceptualize it. And science says the universe is a _lot_ older than six thousand years." Warlock licked her lips, crossing the arm not holding her phone over her chest and squinting up at the ceiling, as if she could drill a hole through it and see the expression on his face.

"There's two theories on predestination, right?" she continued. "First, that God herself has planned the universe down to every last microsecond and every last atom and is making it all run, and second, that the universe runs exclusively off of physics and chemistry and all of that other science stuff, so as soon as the Big Bang happened, everything else was going to follow along exactly as it has. Creationism doesn't _have _to contradict the second theory--God could create the plan for humans and other modern species specifically, and then all she has to do is fine tune all the settings on the universe, set off the Big Bang, and let the simulation run. Time gets invented when the humans show up to give them something to work with, and all the angels are too busy, you know, playing harps and smoking their heavenly weed, or whatever, to pay attention to the dinosaurs in the meantime."

He snorted. "_But the world isn't predestined_," he told her dryly. "_Humans have free will_."

"So?" Warlock said, refusing to let herself be stymied for even a moment. "What about ducks?"

"_What _about_ ducks_?!?"

"Or squirrels? Or woolly mammoths? Do _they_ have free will?"

"_Just the humans_."

"So God lets the simulation run until the humans show up, and then she flips a switch to turn the free will setting back on. Can you tell me," she said insistently, "that there's not even the _slightest_ chance that that's possible?"

Crowley made another set of indistinguishable noises. "_You should be having this conversation with Aziraphale_."

"So you can't then," she said, satisfied. "Good."

"_Good_?!?"

"I like questions that you have to work for an answer on," Warlock told him, as her thumb worried at the edge of her couch cushion. "Otherwise what's the point in asking them?"

"_To get an answer_," he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world to him. From what she remembered of Nanny when she was young, perhaps it was.

"Maybe if you're boring." Warlock dropped her chin onto her knees, and then she took a deep breath. (And then she took one more, just for good measure.) "When are you moving, then?"

"_Should I make you work for that answer_?" he asked snidely.

"I'm hanging up."

"_No_!" The sudden strength of his voice shocked her--she nearly fumbled her phone as she flinched. "_No, I, er. Next week. I was packing when you called, actually. Dropped the couch on my foot._"

"Explains the swearing."

He was quiet for a moment. "_Warlock_," he said awkwardly, "_you have to know that we_\--"

"I don't want to talk about it," she said bluntly. "I haven't forgiven you yet."

"_Yet_," Crowley repeated softly.

Warlock pursed her lips, squeezing her eyes shut. "Yet," she confirmed, the word carving its way out of her like a glacier across a continent. "Will I still be able to reach you on this number?"

"_Always_," he promised, and she was pretty sure he meant it, this time.

Warlock was silent for a long moment, then asked, softly, “And did you mean what you said about Harriet? About—about how much she loves me?”

Crowley breathed out. “_’Lock…_”

“Look,” she snapped, her cheeks flooding with heat, “it’s a yes or no question—”

“_She isn’t any better at saying it than you are_,” he said dryly, “_but she’s always loved you, Warlock; I promise. Aziraphale’s a bit of a bloodhound about that sort of thing_.”

"Okay," she said, and then she hung up.

Warlock stared unseeing at her television screen for a long moment. "Okay," she repeated, phone clenched in one white knuckled grip, and pushed herself to her feet to pace first one way and then back the other, tapping the phone against her lip.

"Okay," she said, forcefully, coming to a stop in the center of her living room, and placed another call. It was picked up on the first ring.

"_Warlock_?!" Harriet said frantically. "_What's wrong? Did something happen? Are you hurt? Oh, god_\--"

"Harriet," she tried to interject, but her mother had lowered the phone from her ear to speak rapidly into the intercom she had with her secretary.

"_Mads, I need the first direct flight to Heathrow--no, I'll take a one with a layover, if the landing time is earlier. And call me a car--_"

"Harriet!"

"_I need to go home, I don't have my passport on me_\--"

"_Harriet_!" Warlock snapped.

"_Oh, god, I know, honey, I'm so far away but_\--"

"Harriet, would you shut up and listen to me?!? I'm fine!"

Harriet sucked in a shaky breath, letting it back out like it was fear and relief all rolled into one. "_You are_?"

"Of course I am!"

"_You just, um. You don't normally call_," Harriet said weakly, and then she lowered her voice to a stressed hush. "_Do you need money? Are you being blackmailed_?"

"You're insane."

"_Well, then why are you calling me_?" Harriet asked exasperatedly. "_Cancel the flight and the car, Mads, thank you_."

"I'm not allowed to want to talk to my mother?" Warlock muttered, shoving her free hand in the pocket of her jeans and staring up at the ceiling once more.

"_No, I--no, of course, sweetheart, I'm always here if you want to talk_," Harriet said softly. "_What's up, kiddo_?"

Warlock licked her lips, closing her eyes. "Ran into Nanny and Brother Francis," she said, as casually as she was capable.

"_Oh_," Harriet said.

"They're together," she added, awkwardly, and Harriet hummed.

"_I did always wonder_."

"I'm looking forward to seeing you at Thanksgiving," Warlock blurted.

The other end of the line went deadly silent. She couldn't even hear Harriet breathing--just the ribbitting of the frogs, in the back corner of her living room. Warlock squeezed her eyes shut.

"Mom?" she asked, uncertainly, and Harriet drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "Mom, are you _crying_?"

"_I'm so sorry, sweetheart_," she said, and Warlock's stomach dropped into her shoes as she looked around, frantically. Trust her to say something stupid and sappy and then have the trip be cancelled--

"_I'm so sorry you have to hear this_," Harriet said, and hiccupped. "_Oh god--I don't know why I'm crying. I just--oh, Warlock, did you mean it_?"

"Yeah," she said, her own voice thick, and Harriet was silent for another moment--getting herself together enough to be able to speak, Warlock realized, and she dropped heavily onto her couch.

"_Oh, darling_," Harriet sobbed. "_I love you so much. I thought I'd missed my chance with you_."

"Never," Warlock promised, clamping her hand over her eyes as if that could keep the tears from falling. "Mom, I love you, too."

"_I'm trying so hard, sweetheart_. _I know you wanted space._"

"I do. Just--just maybe not as much."

"_I can do that. Honey, I can--whatever you want, I can do it_."

"Divorce my father," Warlock joked, her voice thick.

"_Done_."

"I--what?"

"_Sweetheart, I drew the papers up the same night you came out, when he said--when he said all those terrible things. I knew I would lose one of you, and obviously--obviously he was no longer the man I married. Maybe he never had been. He talked me out of it by threatening to sue for custody, so he could save his reputation, and he promised he'd get a posting overseas. I tried to keep him out of your life as much as I could, but if you want me to make it official-_-"

"That's why he's in the Middle East?" Warlock said, dumbfounded. Her entire body felt numb. How had she never-- She'd never noticed that her parents were _that_ kind of separated.

"_I should have told you_," Harriet said quietly, like a woman condemned.

"Yeah," Warlock rasped. She rested her elbow on her knee, staring unseeing downwards. "I'd have told you to do it as soon as I turned 18."

Harriet gave a watery laugh. "_No time like the present_."

"We'll celebrate when you're here next month. I know a guy who can get me some downright _heavenly_ weed. Do you have a bong, or should I order one off Amazon?"

"_You're testing me again_," her mother said on a huff, and Warlock snickered.

"We'll just make brownies, then."

"_I'm hanging up on you_."

"Call you next week?" Warlock said, except that it came out more like a question.

"_Of course, honey. Any time_."

"Love you, Mom. You don’t—you don’t need to get a hotel."

Harriet’s voice softened impossibly further. "_Okay_. _Love you, too, sweetheart_."

Warlock lowered the phone from her ear and breathed out. "Okay," she said again, as she glanced at the time on the stove. "Now who you gonna call?"

A question like that only had one answer, of course.

"_What's up_?" Pinto asked. "_I'm on the way over. I bought pizza rolls_."

"I'm awed by your culinary ambition," Warlock said dryly.

"_What are best friends for_?" Pinto asked smugly. "_What, indeed.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does Britain even have a Do Not Call list? Whatever.
> 
> Thank you all for joining me on this journey. I hope you found something here to make it all worth your time <3

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr! crowleydoesntknowwhatapodcastis.tumblr.com


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